All Scholars

Known familiarly as “Jasha,” he was a student of critical realist Nicolai Hartmann (1882-1950) at Marburg , the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) and particularly his assistant Martin Heidigger (1889-1976). His Marburg friend Leo Strauss (1899-1973) wrote, “Klein was the first to understand the possibility which Heidigger had opened without intending it: the possibility of a genuine return to classical philosophy, to the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle.” (Strauss, 31).  His ideas originated while he was still in Germany but were polished after his emigration to America in 1938 among the group of fellow émigrés. His approach was to prune away all accreted theories and interpretations and look examine the original bases of philosophy. His extension of the work of his teachers Husserl and Heidigger on formalization appears in his great work on symbolic mathematics, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, by which he traced the origin of modern mathematics past Renaissance theories to the Greek concept of arithmos. His translations and deeply insightful commentary on Platonic dialogues made him a pre-eminent Platonist, whom Strauss called “intellectually the counterpart of what Hitler was politically.” Many important expressions of his thought began as lectures at St. John’s and only a few were published. When they were published, they were always signed simply “J. Klein."