Dieter Wittich (born 7 February 1930 in Mansbach; died 22 June 2011 in Strausberg) was a German philosopher. From 1966, he taught at the Karl Marx University of Leipzig, where he held the only chair in epistemology that existed in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). [1]
Raised in Schmalkalden in the Thuringian Forest, Wittich studied under Georg Klaus, first at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena and, from 1953, at the Humboldt University. In 1960 he earned his doctorate with a dissertation on the controversy over materialism and began lecturing on Marxist–Leninist epistemology the same year. From 1966, Wittich taught at the Karl Marx University in Leipzig, where he held the GDR’s only chair in epistemology. From 1974 to 1990, he served as dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities, retiring in 1995.
Wittich published approximately 150 scholarly works, both in the GDR and internationally, including in the United States, England, Austria, and Colombia. He was an expert on contemporary, non-Marxist philosophy of science in the Anglo-Saxon world. In 1979, he became a member of the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities, [2] and in 1995, of the Leibniz Society of Sciences at Berlin.
According to Heinrich Opitz, Wittich founded the “Leipzig school of epistemology” in the 1960s, which sought to systematically compile the scattered remarks of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on epistemology. Through this effort, Opitz argued, Marxist epistemology “regained its genuinely appropriate place within the system of Marxist philosophy.” [3]
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