Philosopher
Edith Landmann-Kalischer
1877–1951
Also known as Edith Kalischer
German philosopher of art and value who argued that aesthetic judgements are cognitive, as objective as sense perception, and that art can be true by mirroring the mind.
Edith Kalischer was born in Berlin in 1877 and took her doctorate at Zurich in 1901, with a dissertation on aesthetic contemplation of painting and sculpture, attending lectures by Georg Simmel and Carl Stumpf in Berlin along the way. Philosophy, psychology and art history were her chief interests, at a time when the borders between them were still being drawn.
She married the Swiss economist Julius Landmann and followed his career to Bern, Basel and Kiel. Her work was admired in her day by Max Dessoir, Alexius Meinong and others, and her studies of the poet Stefan George, a regular summer guest of the family, remain important to scholars of his circle. She died in 1951, and her philosophy is only now being rediscovered.
Key ideas
- Aesthetic judgements are cognitive
- Against Kant and most of her contemporaries, she argued that aesthetic valuation works like a sense organ: aesthetic judgements are as objectively valid as sensory ones, and beauty belongs to things just as sensory qualities do.
- Artistic truth
- Artworks are not judgements, but they represent a reality, the reality of the mind, and so can be true or false. As a mirror shows us our face, art shows us our inner life, and it is true when it portrays that faithfully.
- Against an isolated phenomenology
- Though influenced by Husserl, she criticised his phenomenology for its idealism and for cutting itself off from the sciences, especially psychology.
- Tradition
- Western
- Region
- Berlin, Zurich and Basel
- Period
- Contemporary
- Themes
- Art and beauty
Influences
Where these links come from
- Edith Landmann-Kalischer drew on and argued against Edmund Husserl. Source: Daniel Dahlstrom, Edith Landmann-Kalischer, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Key works
- On the Cognitive Value of Aesthetic Judgements, 1905
- On Artistic Truth, 1906
- Transcendence of Knowing (Transcendenz des Erkennens), 1923
Sources
- Daniel Dahlstrom, Edith Landmann-Kalischer, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy