Background
Geyser, Joseph was born on March 16, 1869 in Erkelenz, Germany.
Neo-scholastic philosopher ‘critical realist’
Geyser, Joseph was born on March 16, 1869 in Erkelenz, Germany.
University of Bonn.
1904-1917, Extraordinary Professor, then (1911) Professor of Philosophy, University of Münster. 1917-1924, Professor of Philosophy, University of Freiburg. 1924-1935, Professor of Philosophy, University of Munich.
Geyser was a critical realist attached to the Thomistic tradition. His philosophy was essentially a Christian metaphysics addressing the perennial philosophical questions which theology attempts to answer and seeking completion in a rationally founded knowledge of God. As against idealistic Kantianism, Geyser’s form of critical realism contended that to stand on firm ground philosophy must be based on the view that reality is independent of consciousness, not its product. He maintained that philosophy aims at a progressive penetration into the realm of possible essences of Being, a rational reconstruction of the ‘forms of existence’ insofar as they present themselves to experience. Although akin to Husserl’s phenomenology in some respects. Geyser’s ‘logical objectivism’ differed from the former in its disavowal of intellectual intuition and its claim that the essences which reveal themselves to discursive thought have a real ontological character. Geyser’s position was exemplified throughout his metaphysics. For him true metaphysics does not proceed speculatively by idealistic construction, but inductively by an interpretation of the ‘united facts of experience'. Accordingly. Geyser repudiated any knowledge of God reached by an a priori or immediate encounter with essence and maintained instead that God’s existence can only be discovered a posteriori, with reference to experience. Geyser was one of the most thorough systematic metaphysicians of this century. But his philosophy, similar in outlook to that of another Thomist realist, Father Maréchal, was never widely known. In Germany, it was perhaps the realist metaphysician Nicolai Hartmann who learnt most from Geyser.