20th Century

Hans Jonas Hans Jonas was born in Mönchengladbach, Germany, on 10 May 1903 and died in New Rochelle, New York, on 5 February 1993. He studied philosophy, theology, and art history at Freiburg, Berlin, and Marburg, where he was a student of Martin Heidegger and Rudolf Bultmann and earned his doctorate in 1928 with a dissertation on the concept of Gnosis. In Marburg he began a lifelong friendship with Hannah Arendt. A Jew, he left Germany in 1933 after the Nazi rise to power, spent time in England, and settled in Palestine in 1934; during the Second World War he served in the Jewish Brigade of the British army, and his mother was murdered at Auschwitz. After the war he taught in Israel and Canada and, from 1955, at the New School for Social Research in New York, where he remained until his retirement in 1976. ...

Martin Buber Martin Buber was born in Vienna on 8 February 1878 and died in Jerusalem on 13 June 1965. Raised in Lemberg (Lviv) in the home of his grandfather, the scholar Salomon Buber, he studied philosophy, art history, and German studies in Vienna, Leipzig, Berlin, and Zurich. He became involved early with cultural Zionism and devoted himself to the study of Hasidism, the mystical Jewish tradition of Eastern Europe, which he popularized in works such as The Tales of Rabbi Nachman (1906) and The Legend of the Baal-Shem (1908). From 1925 until the work’s completion in 1961 he translated the Hebrew Bible into German, in collaboration with Franz Rosenzweig and then alone after the latter’s death in 1929. He taught at Frankfurt (1924–1933); with the rise of Nazism he emigrated to Palestine in 1938, where he taught social philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. ...

René Girard René Girard was born in Avignon, France, on 25 December 1923 and died in Stanford, California, on 4 November 2015. Trained as a paleographer and archivist at the École des Chartes, he moved to the United States in 1947 and earned a doctorate in history from Indiana University in 1950. He taught at Johns Hopkins University, at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and, from 1981, at Stanford, where he remained until his retirement in 1995. He was elected to the Académie française in 2005. ...