Rickert's Relevance: The Ontological Nature and Epistemological Functions of Values - Tapa dura

People make judgments about the world around them and about themselves all the time but hardly realize that they intrinsically are connected with values. Heinrich Rickert (1863-1936), in the tradition of Immanuel Kant, put such value-judgments in the center of his theory of knowledge and developed an elaborate philosophy of values in which he tried to avoid both historical relativism and metaphysical absolutism. He also rejected the irrationalism which dominated the vitalist philosophies from Nietzsche to Bergson, and later the French and German currents of existentialism, without, however, falling prey to a one-sided rationalism and intellectualism. He found an elegant solution to the old issue of the demarcation of Natural Science and Cultural Science without favoring, as is still usually done, one of them.

Anton C. Zijderveld was born in 1937 in Malang (Indonesia), studied religion and sociology in the Netherlands and the USA, received a Ph.D. in Sociology at Leiden University in 1966, and his second Ph.D. in Philosophy at Erasmus University in 2006. He taught sociology in New York, Montreal, Tilburg and Rotterdam. He is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the Erasmus University Rotterdam since 2002 and has been Visiting Professor at Montreal (1977-78), Osaka (1988) and Munich (1988-89). Zijderveld published 17 books in Dutch and English (translations in English, Dutch, Turkish, German and Japanese), among which The Abstract Society (Doubleday, 1970). His latest publication is The Institutional Imperative (Amsterdam University Press, 2001). Zijderveld has been a contributor to Het Financieele Dagblad, the Dutch equivalent of The Financial Times since 1990. His current projects include research on Rickert and a cultural-sociological analysis of the cases of Roman Law as described in Justinian's Codex Iuris Civilis.