North American Scholar

Freiburg, Berlin, Vienna; Ph.D. Heidelberg, 1910.

Tchr. gymnasia in Heidelberg, Freiburg, Mannheim; Privat-dozent Heidelberg, 1923-7; ao. prof., 1927-8; o. prof. Marburg, 1928-35; res. assoc. Rockefeller Found., Harvard, 1939-42; lctr. philos. Bryn Mawr, 1939-40, 1942-3; 1944-6; vis. prof, philos. 1946-8; prof, philos. U. Pennsylvania, 1949.

“Das Prinzip der dialektischen Synthesis und die Kantische Philosophie” (Berlin, 1911)

Rezensionen über schöne Literatur von Schelling und Caroline in der Neuen jenaischen Literaturzeitung (Heidelberg, 1912); Plato und die sogenannten Pythagoreer (Halle, 1923); “The Fundamental Opposition of Plato and Aristotle,” AJP 61 (1940) 34-53, 166-85; Saint Augustine and Greek Thought (Cambridge, 1942); Philosophical Understanding and Religious Truth (London, 1945); The Role of History in Christian Thought (Durham, NC, 1949); Wissen, Wollen, Glauben: gesam-melte Aufsätze zur Philosophiegeschichte und Existentialphilosophie, ed. L. Edelstein (Zurich, 1955).

Erich Frank, classicist and philosopher in Germany and America, was a student of Windelband, Wilamowitz, and Eduard Meyer. He succeeded Martin Heidegger at Marburg, but he was dismissed under the Nuremberg laws in 1936; though not physically mistreated, he was briefly imprisoned in a concentration camp. In 1939 he came to the United States under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation.The core of Frank's scholarship was enormous erudition and great control over the instruments of language and research. To this, in his teaching, his lecturing, and his publications, was added the firm faith so evident in his study of St. Paul and in his reliance upon the method of analogy. Frank maintained that the conflict between religion and philosophy was as old as philosophy itself. For him the fundamental philosophical problem was that of originality and uniqueness, as these are manifested in human individuality; the basic moral problem, love of the person for himself.

Personal knowledge.