Fritz Kaufmann (1891-1958) wrote his first dissertation during the first world war. The work, whose topic (“Der Konflikt”) was chosen in reaction to the war, stands under the influence of Husserl, Dilthey and Spranger. The university of Leipzig and probably his teacher Eduard Spranger didn’t accept the dissertation. We don’t know the reasons why Kaufmann failed. But it’s obvious that style and argumentation of the dissertation are problematic. The manuscript of this dissertation (146 typewritten pages) is housed together with other writings of Fritz Kaufmann in the Husserl-Archives at the KU Leuven (“Kaufmann Nachlass”). In this blog we like to make parts of the dissertation accessible and hopefully to start up a discussion about it. Beside the doubtable quality we believe that the dissertation has an historical value because it’s one of the earliest (phenomenological) reflections (1918) about the war.
