Felix Kaufmann


Felix Kaufmann was an Austrian-American philosopher of law.

Biography

Kaufmann studied jurisprudence and philosophy in Vienna. From 1922 to 1938 he was a Privatdozent there. During this time Kaufmann was associated with the Vienna Circle. He also wrote on the foundations of mathematics where, along with Hermann Weyl and Oskar Becker, he was attempting to apply the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl to constructive mathematics.
In 1938, the conditions for Jewish scholars became too hard and he left for the USA. There he taught until his death as a law professor, in the Graduate Faculty of the New York School for Social Research. Kaufmann also aided fellow Austrian emigres in need of assistance during the pre-war years when the situation became dire for Jewish academics and scholars in Germany and Austria. Interceding on Karl Popper's behalf, Popper was offered academic hospitality at Cambridge University and a stipend of £150 for one year - this offer was transferable, and Friedrich Waismann took it up when Popper went to New Zealand instead.
In 1936 he produced a book on the methodology of the social sciences. After moving to the United States he was invited to write a similar book in English, but what he produced was significantly different, under the influence of Dewey's Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. The original book was translated over 70 years later.

Works