Paul Hensel

Not to be confused with Paul Hensel (politician) or Paul Hensel (trade unionist).

Hensel, c. 1900

Paul Hugo Wilhelm Hensel (17 May 1860, Groß-Barthen, Province of Prussia – 11 November 1930, Erlangen) was a German philosopher.

Biography

See also: Mendelssohn family

Hensel was born in Groß-Barten (now in Gvardeysky District) in the Province of Prussia. He was the son of the landowner and entrepreneur Sebastian Hensel, brother of the mathematician Kurt Hensel, grandson of the composer Fanny Mendelssohn and the painter Wilhelm Hensel. Fanny was the sister of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, daughter of Abraham Mendelssohn Bartholdy, and granddaughter of philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, and entrepreneur Daniel Itzig. Both of Hensel's paternal grandmothers and his mother were from Jewish families that had converted to Christianity.

Hensel became a professor of philosophy at Heidelberg and Erlangen, where he taught until 1928. At Erlangen, Hensel was the supervisor of Hans Reichenbach's PhD dissertation on the theory of probability. Paul Hensel's first marriage was to Käthe Rosenhayn (1861–1910) in 1896. The marriage produced their son Bruno Hensel (1899–1945). In 1917, Paul Hensel remarried to Elisabeth Nelson, née Schemmann (1884–1954), who had a son in her first marriage also and so brought him into her new marriage. She had two daughters with Paul Hensel: the pianist and music teacher Fanny Kistner-Hensel (1918–2006) and the historian Cécile Lowenthal-Hensel (1923–2012).

Works

• Über die Beziehung des reinen Ich bei Fichte zur Einheit der Apperception bei Kant [On the relationship between Fichte's pure I and Kant's unity of apperception], 1885 (doctoral thesis under Alois Riehl)
• Ethisches Wissen und ethisches Handeln, 1889
• Hauptprobleme der Ethik, 1903
• Kleine Schriften und Vorträge, 1930

External links

• Works by Paul Hensel at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Paul Hensel at Internet Archive
• Works by Paul Hensel at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Probleme/Projekte/Prozesse: Hochzeit im Hause Mendelssohn at www.luise-berlin.de
• AIM25: Thesaurus-assisted Personal Name search at www.aim25.ac.uk