 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|
|
|
|||||
|
 |
 |
Biography of Oswald SpenglerName: Oswald SpenglerBirth Date: May 29, 1880 Death Date: May 8, 1936 Place of Birth: Blankenburg, Germany Nationality: German Gender: Male Occupations: philosopher Oswald Spengler The German philosopher Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) is famous for his Decline of the West. He held that civilizations, like biological organisms, pass through a determinable life cycle and that the modern West was approaching the end of such a cycle.Oswald Spengler was born at Blankenburg am Harz on May 29, 1880, the son of a postal official. Although mathematics and natural science were his major subjects at the University of Halle, he received his doctorate for a dissertation on Heraclitus in 1904. After recovering from a nervous breakdown in 1905-1906, Spengler taught in secondary schools until a small inheritance from his mother allowed him in 1911 to move to Munich as a private scholar. Spengler never married.Exempted from military service because of poor health, Spengler wrote the major part of The Decline of the West during the war years under conditions of great economic hardship. The first volume appeared in 1918, the second in 1922.The …showed first 150 words…
…showed last 150 words…in the condemnation of the book and the man by the Nazis. Spengler died on May 8, 1936. Associated Works The Decline of the West Further Reading The best English-language introduction to Spengler's thought is H. Stuart Hughes, Oswald Spengler: A Critical Estimate (1952). Other books include E. H. Goddard and P. A. Gibbons, Civilisation or Civilisations: An Essay on the Spenglerian Philosophy of History (1926), and William Harlan Hale, Challenge to Defeat: Modern Man in Goethe's World and Spengler's Century (1932). An extensive discussion of Spengler is in Pitirim A. Sorokin, Modern Historical and Social Philosophies (1963; first published in 1950 as Social Philosophies of an Age of Crisis), and a brief chapter on him is in Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind (1952).Fischer, Klaus P., History and prophecy: Oswald Spengler and The decline of the West, Durham, N.C.: Moore Pub. Co., 1977. Hughes, H. Stuart (Henry Stuart), Oswald Spengler, New Brunswick, U.S.A.: Transaction Publishers, 1992. |