. . .
at the summit of La Margna/ Sils/ Engadin (Switzerland)
i
. . .
at the summit of La Margna/ Sils/ Engadin (Switzerland)
i
Hans-Joachim Niemann
Dr. rer.nat.
freelance philosopher, scientist (laser chemistry); for some years a lecturer of philosophy at the University of Bamberg (Germany); translator (Popper Postscript I and III).
I was born in 1941 in Kiel in Northern Germany during a bomb raid. Since then I hate noise. Later I learned something more about World War II and those who unleashed it. The question 'how was it possible?' (that is: Nazi-Germany) became a life-long problem for me and my generation. As a child I lived in Halle/Saale (East Germany, the DDR up to1990). After twelve years inside a leftist totalitarian state I had got two of those 'how-was-it-possible' problems. My subsequent solution is rather simple: replace the political question of 'right or left?' by the moral question of 'right or wrong?'. Many years after these experiences I became a quite enthusiastic reader of Karl Popper and Hans Albert.
I had lived in many parts of Germany, before I preferred staying in Bavaria, where I live now for over 40 years. When I look out of my window it pleases me to see a part of the national park 'Frankonian Swiss'. Frankonia belongs to Bavaria, - thanks to Napoleon who came to tidy things up in our country some 200 years ago.
I studied physics, philosophy and chemistry at the universities of Kiel, Munich, Marburg and Tübingen resulting in a couple of papers in physical chemistry and a thesis in the field of laser-induced chemistry. In Tübingen, I became a 'Diplom-Chemiker', a qualified chemist, in 1969 and got a doctorate in 1972.
Since 1969 I live with computers. The first one was as big as a house, fed with punch cards and had a memory of only 64 Kilobyte. So you had to write very sophisticated programs because of the poor RAMs. Similar to the 'on-board computer' in our head, the main problem used to be that the more words and numbers you stored, the less capacity was left for the program code. From that I learned why there are encyclopedic people on the one hand and thinking ones on the other. As for me, I decided to be a thinker, if necessary at the expense of RAMs for those many facts of extensive historical knowledge. However, I admire those eggheads who have enough RAMs for both: facts and thinking.
Until 1973 I was busy doing postdoc research for the German Research Foundation ('Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft') and training students in thermodynamics at the University of Tübingen. Then, for eleven years, I was with 'Kraftwerkunion AG' (Siemens AG). My research was about chemical reactions induced by laserlight. None of my results were allowed to be published, apart from what is disclosed in a number of (run-out-)patents.
In 1984 I decided to become a freelance writer. For years, I did research in the field of philosophy of science before giving lectures on critical rationalism both at the University of Bamberg and for an interested public. I was co-founder of the Fränkische Gesellschaft für Philosophie in Bamberg and of the Gesellschaft für kritische Philosophie in Nürnberg (regional Frankonian Societies of Philosophy). In 1994 I was invited to give a guest lecture on 'Rational Decisions' at the University of Passau.
After having discussed a manuscript about critical rationalism firstly
with Hans Albert, who gave me a lot of good advice, and then with
Karl Popper, who also encouraged me, I published Die Strategie
der Vernunft - Rationalität in Erkenntnis, Moral und Metaphysik
(The Strategy of Reason - Rationality in the fields of Knowledge, Morals,
and Metaphysics) by VIEWEG (1993) in a philosophy of science serial with
renowned authors like Reichenbach, Lakatos and Feyerabend as my predecessors. I
also gave a lot of my time to co-founding the philosophical journal "Aufklärung und
Kritik" ('Enlightenment
and Critique').
My philosophical papers of this period are concerned with problems of critical rationalism or with examples of a quite thorough criticism of contemporary philosophy.
I also translated the writings of some other philosophers, especially two important books of Karl Popper (see translation).
When asked about my philosophical interests, I would like to stress the point that you can handle philosophical problems like an engineer. Therefore, I give decision schemes for solving practical problems in the field of morals or even metaphysics. Apart from this, I consider it to be of necessitiy to criticize the scientific standards of philosophy. There is something deeply wrong in contemporary philosophy. The institution of criticism doesn't work as it should do and as it still does in science, where I was used to handle it. The widespread anything-goes-relativism makes everything immune against criticism. Consequently any publications up to nonsense are possible and their evaluation is made by means of measuring public success. Public success however is in many cases fabricated on the grounds of what one may call 'philosophical populism', which works by repeating and reinforcing the prejudices of the public. A discussion about the significance of problems and the testability of the proposed solutions - that is what I miss.