Abstract

Kurt Rudolf Fischer, Honorarprofessor at the University of Vienna, is a Viennese intellectual who has spent most of his prófessional life in exile. Because of his Jewish background, he was forced to leave Austria in the late 1930s. He spent much of his youth in Shanghai and then moved to the United States where he pursued his academic career. Exile, of course, is not an untypical Austrian fate for someone of his generation. In the seventies Fischer resettled in Vienna. Since then he has brought some fresh air to a sometimes quite stale academic scene with his charismatic presence. As the editors of the Festschrift note in the preface, he has succeeded in bringing together “the tradition of European and the praxis of the Angloamerican philosophy”. He has introduced many Austrian students to the ideas of pragmatism and analytical philosophy and facilitated academic exchange between Austria and the United States. In his teaching and writing he has also sought to bridge the gap between philosophy and psychoanalysis. The essays collected in Philosophie, Psychoanalyse, Emigration illustrate Fischer’s broad range of interests with topics ranging from Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle to the sport of soccer. The contributions submitted by colleagues and friends — philosophers, historians, literary scholars, psychoanalysts, sociologists and legal experts — make for a fascinating blend of exemplary scholarship and biographical reminiscences from Vienna to Shanghai and back again. Of the Americans who contributed to the volume there is also Fischer’s teacher and friend, the renowned philosopher Benson Mates who in recent years has only rarely published an article