Erich Kahler – författare

Man the Measure is the work of a man who has searched passionately for the reasons of the current breakdown of values and ways of life, attempting to write history as the biography of man and from it to gain a view of the future of man.

Man the Measure is the work of a man who has searched passionately for the reasons of the current breakdown of values and ways of life, attempting to write history as the biography of man and from it to gain a view of the future of man.

This is an augmented edition of a superb volume by one of the foremost analysts of European institutions and ideas. Here the late Erich Kahler turns his attention to the special character of the Jewish people, formed uniquely through the interaction of internal and external circumstances in which past and present merge.The chapters in this book deal with persistent problems of Jewish identity. Kahler claims these can be fully understood only by awareness of the close interconnection between the singular ethnic nature and the unique social structure of the Jewish people. He discusses the Jews in Europe, specifically the historical implications of a strict tribal ritual that yet permitted the widest spiritual scope.The second half of the book concerns anti-Semitism, in relation to Jews and Germans. How did the German people, seemingly so congenial to the Jews, develop a murderous revulsion against them, ending a long and fruitful symbiosis? Kahler sees this as a parallel to the parricidal rejection of the Jews by the Christian church. His argument is deepened in an added chapter, new to this volume, on the major forms and features of anti-Judaism, ''in which the earlier theme of the universal and the specific are seen as central not only to the inner history of Judaism but also to the specific interaction of Jews and Gentiles throughout social history.

This is an augmented edition of a superb volume by one of the foremost analysts of European institutions and ideas. Here the late Erich Kahler turns his attention to the special character of the Jewish people, formed uniquely through the interaction of internal and external circumstances in which past and present merge.The chapters in this book deal with persistent problems of Jewish identity. Kahler claims these can be fully understood only by awareness of the close interconnection between the singular ethnic nature and the unique social structure of the Jewish people. He discusses the Jews in Europe, specifically the historical implications of a strict tribal ritual that yet permitted the widest spiritual scope.The second half of the book concerns anti-Semitism, in relation to Jews and Germans. How did the German people, seemingly so congenial to the Jews, develop a murderous revulsion against them, ending a long and fruitful symbiosis? Kahler sees this as a parallel to the parricidal rejection of the Jews by the Christian church. His argument is deepened in an added chapter, new to this volume, on the major forms and features of anti-Judaism, ''in which the earlier theme of the universal and the specific are seen as central not only to the inner history of Judaism but also to the specific interaction of Jews and Gentiles throughout social history.

Erich Kahler sees cultural history as a subtle process in which reality plays upon consciousness and consciousness itself is forever transforming reality. He traces the ebb and flow of this relationship by studying changes in narrative form from its beginnings in the Gilgamesh Cycle to the end of the eighteenth century. The general direction is toward a growing inwardness, he finds; what takes place is an expansion of consciousness as man constantly draws outer space, the contents of a more and more complex world, into what Rilke called Weltinnenraum, "inner space."Originally published in 1973.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

For most mathematicians and many mathematical physicists the name Erich Kähler is strongly tied to important geometric notions such as Kähler metrics, Kähler manifolds and Kähler groups. They all go back to a paper of 14 pages written in 1932. This, however, is just a small part of Kähler''s many outstanding achievements which cover an unusually wide area: From celestial mechanics he got into complex function theory, differential equations, analytic and complex geometry with differential forms, and then into his main topic, i.e. arithmetic geometry where he constructed a system of notions which is a precursor and, in large parts, equivalent to the now used system of Grothendieck and Dieudonné. His principal interest was in finding the unity in the variety of mathematical themes and establishing thus mathematics as a universal language.

In this volume Kähler''s mathematical papers are collected following a "Tribute to Herrn Erich Kähler" by S. S. Chern, an overview of Kähler''s life data by A. Bohm and R. Berndt, and a Survey of his Mathematical Work by the editors. There are also comments and reports on the developments of the main topics of Kähler''s work, starting by W. Neumann''s paper on the topology of hypersurface singularities, J.-P. Bourguignon''s report on Kähler geometry and, among others by Berndt, Bost, Deitmar, Ekeland, Kunz and Krieg, up to A. Nicolai''s essay "Supersymmetry, Kähler geometry and Beyond".

As Kähler''s interest went beyond the realm of mathematics and mathematical physics, any picture of his work would be incomplete without touching his work reaching into other regions. So a short appendix reproduces three of his articles concerning his vision of mathematics as a universal Theme together with an essay by K. Maurin giving an "Approach to the philosophy of Erich Kähler".