Gernot Böhme (3 January 1937 – 20 January 2022) was a German philosopher and author, contributing to the philosophy of science, theory of time, aesthetics, ethics, and philosophical anthropology. He is the main pioneer of German ecocriticism, the study of the relationship between culture and the environment. He has been the director of the Institute for Practical Philosophy in

Darmstadt Darmstadt () is a city in the States of Germany, state of Hesse in Germany, located in the southern part of the Frankfurt Rhine Main Area, Rhine-Main-Area (Frankfurt Metropolitan Region). Darmstadt has around 160,000 inhabitants, making it th ...

Hesse Hesse (, , ) or Hessia (, ; german: Hessen ), officially the State of Hessen (german: links=no, Land Hessen), is a state in Germany. Its capital city is Wiesbaden, and the largest urban area is Frankfurt. Two other major historic cities are Da ...

, since 2005.Mind & Matter Vol. 9(2), "About Authors", 2011
/ref> Despite being one of Germany's most acclaimed public intellectuals, very little of his work has so far been translated into English.

Biography

Böhme was born in

Dessau Dessau is a town and former municipality in Germany at the confluence of the rivers Mulde and Elbe, in the '' Bundesland'' (Federal State) of Saxony-Anhalt. Since 1 July 2007, it has been part of the newly created municipality of Dessau-Ro� ...

Anhalt Saxony-Anhalt (german: Sachsen-Anhalt ; nds, Sassen-Anholt) is a state of Germany, bordering the states of Brandenburg, Saxony, Thuringia and Lower Saxony. It covers an area of and has a population of 2.18 million inhabitants, making it the ...

Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG),, is a country in Central Europe. It is the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany lies between the Baltic and North Sea to the north and the Alps to the sou ...

. He studied mathematics,

physics Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which rel ...

, and philosophy at the

University of Göttingen The University of Göttingen, officially the Georg August University of Göttingen, (german: Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, known informally as Georgia Augusta) is a public research university in the city of Göttingen, Germany. Founded i ...

and at the

Hamburg University The University of Hamburg (german: link=no, Universität Hamburg, also referred to as UHH) is a public research university in Hamburg, Germany. It was founded on 28 March 1919 by combining the previous General Lecture System ('' Allgemeines Vor ...

, and completed a

PhD PHD or PhD may refer to: * Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification Entertainment * '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series * ''Piled Higher and Deeper'', a web comic * Ph.D. (band), a 1980s British group ** Ph.D. (Ph.D. albu ...

in 1965 at Hamburg University. As a research scientist he worked at the

Max-Planck-Institute The Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science (german: Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften e. V.; abbreviated MPG) is a formally independent non-governmental and non-profit association of German research institutes. ...

with Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. From 1977 to 2002 he was

Professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an academic rank at universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who professes". Professor ...

of Philosophy at Technical University of Darmstadt. He died on 20 January 2022, at the age of 85.

Books

; German *1974 ''Zeit und Zahl''. Vittorio Klosterman. Frankfurt am Main *1995 ''Atmosphäre: Essays zur neuen Ästhetik''. Frankfurt am Main *1996 (with Hartmut Böhme) ''Feuer, Wasser, Erde, Luft: Eine Kulturgeschichte der Elemente''. München, Beck *1999 ''Theorie des Bildes''. Fink, München *2001 ''Aisthetik. Vorlesungen über Ästhetik als allgemeine Wahrnehmungslehre'', Fink *2002 ''Die Natur vor uns. Naturphilosophie in pragmatischer Hinsicht''. Kusterdingen *2003 ''Der Typ Sokrates'', Suhrkamp *2005 ''Goethes Faust als philosophischer Text''. Die Graue Edition, Kusterdingen *2006 ''Architektur und Atmosphäre''. München *2008 ''Invasive Technisierung. Technikphilosophie und Technikkritik''. Kusterdingen *2008 ''Ethik leiblicher Existenz. Über unseren moralischen Umgang mit der eigenen Natur''. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main ; English translations *2001 ''Ethics in Context: The Art of Dealing with Serious Questions'', Polity *2012 ''Invasive Technification: Critical Essays in the Philosophy of Technology'', Continuum *2017 ''Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces'', Bloomsbury *2017 ''Critique of Aesthetic Capitalism'', Mimesis

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Bohme, Gernot 1937 births 2022 deaths 20th-century German philosophers 21st-century German philosophers Philosophers of science Philosophers of art German ethicists German male writers Academic staff of Technische Universität Darmstadt People from Dessau-Roßlau University of Hamburg alumni