Thomas Seebohm

Thomas Seebohm (born William Thomas Mulvany Seebohm, July 7, 1934, Gleiwitz, Upper Silesia – August 25, 2014, Bonn, Germany) was a phenomenological philosopher whose wide-ranging interests included, among others, Immanuel Kant, Edmund Husserl, hermeneutics, and logic. Other areas of Professor Seebohm's interests included the history of philosophy, philosophy of history, philosophy of the formal sciences, methodology and philosophy of the human sciences, the history of 19th century British Empiricism, American pragmatism, analytic philosophy, philosophy of law and practical philosophy, and the development of the history of philosophy in Eastern Europe. Despite this diverse span of interests, Seebohm was chiefly known as a phenomenologist, who "above all...considered himself a creative phenomenologist, who as a critically reflecting philosopher would look at all major issues with which he became confronted, from a transcendental phenomenological point of view." Seebohm was born in Gleiwitz, Upper-Silesia as son of the German minister of transport Hans-Christoph Seebohm and graduated high school in 1952 from the division of languages (later passing an additional exam in Classical Greek in 1956). He learned cabinetmaking after high school from 1952–1954, passing his journeyman's examination in March 1954 and began his academic career thereafter. His university studies were conducted at the universities of Hamburg, Bonn, Saarbrücken, and Mainz with focuses in philosophy, Slavic languages, Slavonic literature, and sociology. He earned his PhD summa cum laude in philosophy, Slavonic literature, and sociology from the University of Mainz in 1960 with the completion of his dissertation, Die Bedingungen der Möglichkeit der Transzendentalphilosophie: Edmund Husserls transcendental-phänomenologischer Ansatz, dargestellt im Anschluss an seine Kant-Kritik (The conditions of the possibility of transcendental philosophy: Edmund Husserl's transcendental-phenomenological assessment, presented in connection with his criticism of Kant), which was published later in 1962.