Background
Marquard, Odo was born on February 26, 1928 in Stolp, Pommern.
philosopher university professor writer
Marquard, Odo was born on February 26, 1928 in Stolp, Pommern.
1954, doctorate awarded. University Freiburg in Breisgau, under Max Muller. 1963. Habilitationschrift, University of Munster.
Rousseau. Kant, Schelling. Marx. Kierkegaard. Heine, Heidegger, Gadamer, Plessner and Joachim Ritter.
1963, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Münster. Briefly at University of Giessen. 1993. Professor of Philosophy.
University of Darmstadt.
Odo Marquard is a ‘free thinker’ who upholds the tradition of German philosophical sceptic>sn’ which reaches back through Nietzsche and Ka to the nonconformist tradition of Protesta0 thought. As recent German political history has whole life long.. Experience without philosophy is blind, philosophy without experience is empty; one cannot really have a philosophy without first having the experience to which it is the answer’. Marquard was initiated into philosophical scepticism in Joachim Ritter’s heterogeneous Collegium Philosophicum. Ritter taught that one found one’s philosophical voice by encountering alien attitudes firsthand, learnmg from difference. In in praise of polytheism’ (1968), Marquard argued that freedom does not consist in having a single history or philosophy °ut in having many. Intellectual pluralism is reedorn’s sceptical defence against the prisons monotheistic and monological metaphysics, •scepticism, he suggests, knows that conflict and contradiction are undeniably present in human beings and should be accepted rather than solved, cr only in the anatagonisms of diversity can free thought arise. Marquard’s scepticism stands upon a central Msight of phenomenological hermeneutics concerning our lack of disposition over prior givens. . human beings we can never achieve a Principled beginning or departure from an ungrounded past but only a remaining within hat one already historically was: one must ‘link up. We cannot ‘spend our lives waiting for a Principled permission to finally begin living’ since ur death comes more quickly than rational Principles do. Accordingly, Mar- 9uard emerges as a substantial opponent of cr,tical theory: ‘we must provide grounds not for °Ur non-choices, but for our choices, for the things We can change. The burden of proof is on the one bo proposes change.. Death comes too soon to Permit total changes and total rational groundlngs’(pp. 14-15). Scepticism is linked by Marquard to hermebeutics as the latter is a means of understanding art of navigating oneself through the con- and them. Marquard abandons the notion of an absolute text in favour of a pluralization of both text and reader. ‘This’, he argues, ‘represents a separation of the powers that texts and interpretations are. so that it is now possible to say that.. hermeneutics is scepticism and scepticism today is hermeneutics'. Marquard’s scepticism bids farewell to principled philosophy but not to a philosophical questioning which seeks a diversity of approaches and hence intellectual choice: 'real freedom.. consists in freedoms, in the plural. These come about as a result of the motleyness of what is pre-given: as a result of the fact that the pluralitythe rivalry, the counterbalancing oppositions, the balance—of its powers either neutralize or limits their grip on the individual. Freedoms are the result of the separation of powers.. Scepticism’s doubt is not absolute perplexity but is rather a manifold sense of the isothenes diaphonia, the balance not only of conflicting dogmas, but also of conflicting realities. Sources: Kürschners Deutscher Gelehrten-Kalender. 1992, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1992.
Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung]
He is considered as a member of the Ritter-School.