Eduard von Hartmann

Born in Berlin in 1842, Eduard von Hartmann served briefly in the Prussian military before chronic illness forced him to leave that path. He turned to philosophy and became famous with The Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869), a book that argued for an underlying unconscious principle at work in both nature and human life.

Hartmann wrote on a wide range of subjects, including metaphysics, ethics, religion, and aesthetics. Readers often place him between Arthur Schopenhauer and G. W. F. Hegel, since he tried to combine Schopenhauer's emphasis on will with Hegel's idea of rational development.

He remained a prolific writer for decades and died in 1906. Today he is remembered as a distinctive voice in German philosophy and as an important figure in the long history of ideas about the unconscious.