Werner Jaeger

Werner Jaeger (30 July 1888 - 9 October 1961) was one of the leading classicists of the 20th century. Jaeger was born in Lobberich, Germany. He attended school at Lobberich and at the Gymnasium Thomaeum in Kempen before studying at the University of Marburg. He received a Ph.D from Humboldt University of Berlin in 1911 for an immediately famous dissertation on the Metaphysics of Aristotle. Only 26 years old and without habilitation, Jaeger was called on that basis to a professorship with chair at the University of Basel in Switzerland. One year later he moved to a similar position at Kiel, and in 1921 he returned to Berlin, one of the world's leading institutions in the field of classics. Jaeger remained at Berlin until 1936, when he emigrated to the United States because of the Nazis. Jaeger was one of the few German scholars who left Nazi Germany voluntarily: he was neither a Jew nor a Communist nor otherwise on the persecution list, but rather a bourgeois humanist unhappy with Hitler's régime. Thanks to his international fame, and unlike many of his colleagues, Jaeger readily found employment in the USA. He worked as a full professor at the University of Chicago from 1936 to 1939, at which time he moved to Harvard University. He remained in Cambridge, Massachusetts until his death.

Works

\n*Aristoteles (1924)\n*Platons Stellung im Aufbau der griechischen Bildung (1928)\n*Paideia, 3 vols. (from 1934), his magnum opus on Greek thought and education from Homer to Demosthenes

Related Topics

\n*Paideia \nJaeger, Werner