Background
Marc-Wogau, Konrad was born on April 4, 1902 in Moscow.
Historian of philosophy Analytical philosopher
Marc-Wogau, Konrad was born on April 4, 1902 in Moscow.
1946-1968, Professor of Theoretical Philosophy, Uppsala University.
In his youth Marc-Wogau was a disciple of Hagerstrom and, especially, of Phalen. Their influence is evident in the writings of the 1930s, for example in his use of Phalen’s dialectical method in the study of the history of philosophy, and in the interesting discussions in Theoria (1936-1940) between the young Marc-Wogau and the old Ernst Cassirer. Later, however, he was more influenced by the analytical philosophers in Cambridge. Marc-Wogau made very important and comprehensive contributions in two fields: the epistemological discussion of sense data and the study of Kant. For the former his main work is Die Theorie der Sinnesdaten (1945). It contains a thorough scrutiny of theories of empirical knowledge in contemporary British epistemology. It also presents an independent positive theory of the relation between sense-perception and physical objects. Marc-Wogau applies certain results of contemporary experimental psychology of perception, particularly concerning the phenomena of constancy in the sensations of size, shape and colour. He introduces the concept of abstractive difference and a new analysis of existence-sentences of a certain kind. He returned to the sense-data problems in several papers, including one on perceptual space and one on a theory of Ryle’s; a few of these papers are collected in the Philosophical Essays (1967). In the first book on Kant (1932) several important themes of Kant's precritical and critical philosophy are dealt with, for example Kant’s attempt to unite Newton’s and Leibniz’s conceptions of space, the concept of phenomenon and the Trendelenburg gap. In the second book on Kant (1938) both problems concerning teleology and the concept of organism and problems concerning the beautiful and the sublime are dealt with. It also contains an analysis of Kant's moral proof of the existence of God. In spite of its shortness, ‘Kant’s Lehre vom analytischen Urteil’ (1951) is of great interest. Marc-Wogau published many important works outside the above two fields, for example on the problems of historical explanation. His interest in the history of philosophy was by no means limited to Kant: in minor writings he analysed important problems in Plato. Aristotle, Descartes, Berkeley, Fichte. Marx, Hagerstrom and others.