Background
Pfänder, Alexander was born in February 1870 in l, Iserlohn, Germany.
Pfänder, Alexander was born in February 1870 in l, Iserlohn, Germany.
1901-1908. Lecturer, 1908 -35, Professor, Munich University.
Pfänder originally intended to be an engineer, but was drawn to philosophy by the descriptive Psychology of Theodor Lipps. who became his raain teacher. But he grew dissatisfied with Lipps’s Psychologism and moved towards Husserl, who was then developing his phenomenology, becoming the leader of the Munich Phenomenological Circle. Husserl commissioned his Logik, and had high hopes of him, but when the Munich Circle refused to accept his later ideas he distanced himself. Pfänder developed his own version of phenomenology, coming to see it as a check on all other knowledge. The method was threefold: clarification of meaning, temporary suspension °f belief in the object’s reality, and phenomenological verification—a probing perception through which the object may give itself ‘bodily’ to us. Spiegelberg argues that it is more ‘presuppositionless' than Husserl’s. Pfander’s work on directed sentiments, with its analyses of ‘ungenuine’ feelings and its spatial metaphor of the ‘central self’, are especially noteworthy. In his great work on the human Psyche he exhibits the meaning of human life as the creative self-unfolding of an individual nature given to each of us in germ. It contains a remarkable systematization of the fundamental types of motivation. In the posthumously published ethics there is a suggestive separation between the value-ethics and the ethics of obligation. Persistent ill-hcalth prevented his completlng it and the general philosophy. Pfänder was a thinker of extraordinary integnty, profundity and thoroughness. His writing has great clarity, and his descriptions and apt metaphors are seasoned with dry humour.