Agnes Taubert

Agnes Taubert (married name von Hartmann; 7 January 1844 – 8 May 1877) was a German writer and philosopher.

Agnes Taubert
Born(1844-01-07)7 January 1844
Stralsund, Prussia
Died8 May 1877(1877-05-08) (aged 33)
Berlin, German Empire
Notable work
Pessimism and Its Opponents
Spouse(s)
​
(m. 1872)​
Era19th-century philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
SchoolPost-Schopenhauerian pessimism

Biography

Taubert was born in 1844, in Stralsund.[1] She was the daughter of an artillery colonel,[2] who was friends with the father of the philosopher Eduard von Hartmann.[3] In 1872, Taubert married von Hartmann, in Berlin-Charlottenburg and had a child with him.[1]

Taubert was a staunch supporter of her husband's work The Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869) and wrote two books which both critiqued and defended his ideas.[4] Her work Pessimism and Its Opponents (1873) was a major influence on the pessimism controversy in Germany.[4] In the text, she defined the problem that philosophical pessimism engages with as "a matter of measuring the eudaimonological value of life in order to determine whether existence is preferable to non-existence or not"; like von Hartmann, Taubert argued that the answer to this problem is "empirically ascertainable".[5] Taubert has been described as "one of the first women to have a prominent role in a public intellectual debate in Germany"[4] and has been compared to Olga Plümacher, a contemporary female philosopher, who also had a significant role in the pessimism controversy.[6]

Taubert died in 1877, of "an attack of a rheumatism of the joints",[7] which was described as "extremely painful".[8]

Works

References
  1. "Digitale Sammlungen / Gothaisches genealogisches... [284]". digital.ub.uni-duesseldorf.de. Retrieved 2019-09-11.
  2. Hall, Granville Stanley (1912). Founders of Modern Psychology. New York; London: Appleton. p. 184.
  3. Tsanoff, Radoslav A. (1931). The Nature of Evil. New York: The Macmillan Company. p. 344.
  4. Beiser, Frederick C. (2016). "The Pessimism Controversy, 1870–1890". Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860–1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 168. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198768715.001.0001. ISBN 9780198768715.
  5. Dahlkvist, Tobias (2007). Nietzsche and the Philosophy of Pessimism: Schopenhauer, Hartmann, Leopardi (PDF) (Doctoral thesis). Uppsala University.
  6. Roehr, Sabine (2015-10-27). "After Hegel: German Philosophy 1840–1900 by Frederick C. Beiser (review)". Journal of the History of Philosophy. 53 (4): 790–791. doi:10.1353/hph.2015.0073. ISSN 1538-4586.
  7. Beiser, Frederick C. (2016). "Two Forgotten Women Philosophers". After Hegel: German Philosophy, 1840–1900. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. p. 217. ISBN 9780691173719.
  8. Hartmann, Edward von (1895). The Sexes Compared and Other Essays. Translated by Kenner, A. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co. pp. v.
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