Dietrich Von Hildebrand Popular Books

Dietrich Von Hildebrand Biography & Facts

Dietrich Richard Alfred von Hildebrand (12 October 1889 – 26 January 1977) was a German Roman Catholic philosopher and religious writer. Hildebrand was called "the twentieth-century Doctor of the Church" by Pope Pius XII. He was a leading philosopher in the realist phenomenological and personalist movements, producing works in every major field of philosophy, including ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophical anthropology, social philosophy, and aesthetics. Pope John Paul II greatly admired the philosophical work of Hildebrand, remarking once to his widow, Alice von Hildebrand, "Your husband is one of the great ethicists of the twentieth century." Benedict XVI also had a particular admiration and regard for Hildebrand, who knew Ratzinger as a young priest in Munich: "When the intellectual history of the Catholic Church in the twentieth century is written, the name of Dietrich von Hildebrand will be most prominent among the figures of our time." Hildebrand is known for his consistent, public opposition to Nazism before and during World War II. Biography Born and raised in Florence, in the Kingdom of Italy, Hildebrand grew up in a German household, the son of sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand and Irene Schäuffelen, who lived in a former Minim friary. He received his early education from private tutors. Although raised in a home without religion, Hildebrand developed a deep sense for beauty, value, and the sacred from an early age. Sent to Munich at the age of fifteen for his Abitur, Hildebrand enrolled at the University of Munich two years later, where he joined a circle of students who first followed the philosopher Theodor Lipps but soon were swayed by the teachings of Edmund Husserl. Through this circle he came to know Max Scheler, through whose influence (and through his depiction of St. Francis of Assisi) Hildebrand converted to Catholicism in 1914. In 1909 he attended the University of Göttingen, where he completed his doctorate in philosophy under Husserl and Adolf Reinach, whom he later credited with helping to shape his own philosophical views. In 1912, he married Margarete Denck, and with her had one child, Franz. In 1914, he and his wife were received into the Catholic Church. Upon the outbreak of the First World War Hildebrand was drafted into service as a physician's assistant in Munich, serving as a kind of surgical nurse. Hildebrand published his first book, The Nature of Moral Action (Die Idee der Sittlichen Handlung), in 1916, and two years later, after the war had ended, was given a teaching position at the University of Munich, eventually gaining an assistant professorship there in 1924. By then he had published another work, Morality and the Knowledge of Moral Values (Sittlichkeit und Ethische Werterkenntniss) (1921). Hildebrand was a vocal critic of National Socialism, which he saw as anti-Christian and contrary to true philosophical views, as early as 1921. During the Putsch of 1923, Hildebrand was forced to flee Munich briefly for his safety. When Hitler came to power in 1933 Hildebrand fled Germany, going first to Italy, and then to Vienna. There, with the support of the Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, he founded and edited an anti-Nazi weekly paper, Der Christliche Ständestaat ("The Christian Corporative State"). For this, he was sentenced to death in absentia by the Nazis. Hildebrand was once again forced to flee when Hitler annexed Austria in 1938; after the members of the Austrian government, Hildebrand was the person most wanted by the Gestapo. He spent eleven months in Switzerland, near Fribourg. He then moved to Fiac in France, near Toulouse, where he taught at the Catholic University of Toulouse. When the Nazis invaded France in 1940 he went into hiding; after many hardships, and the heroic assistance of Frenchmen, including Edmond Michelet and the American journalist Varian Fry, he was able to escape to Portugal with his wife, their son Franz, and their daughter-in-law. From there they travelled by ship to Brazil and then on to New York City, arriving in 1940. There he taught philosophy at the Jesuit Fordham University on Rose Hill in the Bronx where he then mentored the Catholic author and philosophy professor Ronda Chervin. In 1957 his wife of forty-five years died, and in 1959 he married Alice M. Jourdain, also a philosopher and theologian who was a student of his at Fordham University. Hildebrand retired from teaching in 1960, spending the remaining years of his life writing dozens of books in both German and English. He was a vocal critic of many of the ways in which the Second Vatican Council was implemented, especially the new liturgy. Because of this, he helped to promote appreciation of and attendance at the traditional Mass. He was a founder of Una Voce America and vice director of Luigi Villa's Chiesa viva ("Living Church") But his personalist work—for example, on the freedom of persons and on the unitive end of sexual intercourse—also helped prepare for many aspects of the Second Vatican Council's teachings, and Hildebrand always advocated reading the council's texts in continuity with the Catholic Church's tradition. Hildebrand died in New Rochelle, New York in 1977, after a long struggle with a heart condition. Career Von Hildebrand's academic career spanned several decades, during which he held positions at various institutions, including the University of Munich, Fordham University, and the Jesuit Gregorian University in Rome. He was a prolific author, with over 30 books to his name, covering a range of topics including ethics, aesthetics, philosophy, and theology. Von Hildebrand was particularly known for his opposition to Nazi ideology, and he left Germany in 1933 after he was banned from teaching by the Nazi government. Key philosophical ideas Realist Phenomenology Like Reinach, Scheler, Roman Ingarden, and many Munich phenomenologists, Hildebrand reacted against Edmund Husserl's transcendental idealist turn in phenomenology, on which the meaning of all objects is constituted by conscious subjects. Rather, Hildebrand endorsed a realist version of phenomenology. On this phenomenological method, we set out to focus attention on explanatory, causal, or abstract theories regarding the things we experience, so as to attain "existential contact with reality" and a "living plenitude and full flavor of being" and to do "justice to the qualitative nature of the object." The goal of this method is a direct, intuitive perception of real beings. Hildebrand focuses especially on experiences of essences, that is, of necessary unities of content, like what it is to be a triangle or what it is to be justice. But he also uses this method to show how we can directly analyze all sorts of real phenomena, including human persons, organisms, artworks, and communities. Unlike in Husserl's idealist phenomenology, Hildebrand's philosophical psychology focuses on how real beings appear as intrinsically meaningful, and as g.... Discover the Dietrich Von Hildebrand popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Dietrich Von Hildebrand books.