Georg Picht: A Pioneer in Philosophy, Politics and the Arts

Directed at a global readership, this book offers a representative collection of essays by the German philosopher, Georg Picht (1913-1982), who specialised in Greek philosophy, practical philosophy and philosophy of religion. Picht's themes address different disciplines, such as ancient philosophy, systematic philosophy and political analysis, and often contain critical statements on significant developments from the European Enlightenment to the Cold War era. Other essays offer a distinctive approach to interdisciplinarity that is charac-teristic of the synoptic view of the author. These contributions are relevant to both philosophy and science as they discuss, for instance, philosophical definitions of space and time and the relationship between history and evolution. Another part of the book includes texts on art which present Picht's idea of art, he understands as a paradigm of personal creativity and political autonomy. For the first time key texts of the German philosopher and political thinker Georg Picht are presented to a global readership in English. Like Friedrich Nietzsche, Picht's philosophy is grounded in his outstanding professionalism in the different fields of classics, embracing not only texts and theories of the great thinkers from the pre-Socratic to the post Aristotelian and stoical philosophies but also the mainstreams of ancient literature. Picht's importance as a political author and public adviser is exceptional and may explain why his lifelong friend Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker - another pioneer presented in this series - called him his "teacher".