Abstract

Eric Weil, who died at Nice on February 1, 1977, was a prominent philosopher and an authority on Hegel. He was born at Parchim on June 6, 1904. From 1922 to 1928 he studied under E. Cassirer at Hamburg and Berlin. His doctoral thesis “Die Philosophie des Pietro Pomponazziz” was published in 1932 in the Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie. In 1933 he migrated to France, received French nationality, took part in World War II, and became a prisoner of war in Germany. From 1946 to 1956 he taught in the Ecole Practique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, graduated again, this time in France, with La Logique de la philosophie, his main work published in 1950, was a professor at the universities of Lille, where he organized the Congress of the Internationale Hegel Vereinigung in 1968, and Nice, received an honorary degree at Munster in 1969. His main works are also: Hegel et l’Etat, Philosophie politique, Philosophie morale, Problemes kantiens, Essais et Conférences. For a complete bibliography up to 1970 see Archives de Philosophie 1970, p. 605–622. He helped to get rid of some false interpretations rejected also emphatically the marxist interpretation of Hegel. For Weil, as for, so he thought, Aristotle and Hegel, philosophy is an endless endeavor to build up a “discours coherent” of reality as a whole. Man is a finite being, needy, compelled to act in order to live but, as he is at the same time reasonable, he may live meaningfully, promote freedom and justice, undertake to understand himself and the whole of reality, even violence and error, and mainly the behavior of other people and their conceptions of the world. As philosophy considers man not as an object but as a subject, it is not a science properly but, mainly as the logic of philosophy, it is as coherent and as strict as a science. Weil disliked “constructivism” - as deducing a system from a “necessary being”, or predicting the course of history. Though he was often a fellow traveller of Hegel, he acknowledged more and more that he felt a kantian, but a “post-hegelian” kantian.