Friedrich Ulfers (born 1934) is Professor of German at New York University. He is a distinguished fellow, having been awarded several honors from New York University. He also is the dean of the media and communications division at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, [1] where he confers on the giving of master's and Ph.D. degrees to students. He has written as a literary critic and a philosopher.
Ulfers was born in Giessen, Germany, in 1934. He immigrated to New York, New York, where he attended college. He received a Bachelor of Arts from the City College of New York in 1959, a master's degree in 1961 from NYU, and a Ph.D. from NYU in 1968. [2]
Ulfers began teaching at NYU in 1982 and has worked with EGS since its conception. [1] He has been chair to a Nietzsche Conference at NYU, chair to a special session on Günter Grass for the Modern Language Association, as well as chair to a session on autobiographical writings at Hofstra University. [3]
Ulfers has served numerous administrative functions, such as the NYU's German department director of undergraduate studies, director of the NYU in Berlin summer program in the department of global affairs and, most recently, director of the Deutsches Haus at NYU. [4]
On 15 March 2007, Ulfers was appointed dean of the media and communications division at the EGS, in the place of Wolfgang Schirmacher. [1]
Ulfers has written on a variety of subjects, such as German romanticism, the novel in the 20th century, philosophy at the turn of the century, and post-structuralism as well as deconstruction. [1]
The annual Friedrich Ulfers Prize, established in 2013, honors "a leading publisher, writer, critic, translator, or scholar who has championed the advancement of German-language literature in the United States." [5]
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German classical scholar, philosopher, and critic of culture, who became one of the most influential of all modern thinkers. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the youngest person to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland in 1869, at the age of 24, but resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life; he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and afterward a complete loss of his mental faculties, with paralysis and probably vascular dementia. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897, and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Nietzsche died in 1900, after experiencing pneumonia and multiple strokes.
In philosophy, nihilism is any viewpoint, or a family of views, that rejects generally accepted or fundamental aspects of human existence, namely knowledge, morality, or meaning. There have been different nihilist positions, including that human values are baseless, that life is meaningless, that knowledge is impossible, or that some other highly regarded concepts are in fact meaningless or pointless. The term was popularized by Ivan Turgenev and more specifically by his character Bazarov in the novel Fathers and Sons.
The Übermensch is a concept in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. In his 1883 book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche has his character Zarathustra posit the Übermensch as a goal for humanity to set for itself. The Übermensch represents a shift from otherworldly Christian values and manifests the grounded human ideal. The Übermensch is someone who has "crossed over" the bridge, from the comfortable "house on the lake" to the mountains of unrest and solitude.
Leipzig University, in Leipzig in Saxony, Germany, is one of the world's oldest universities and the second-oldest university in Germany. The university was founded on 2 December 1409 by Frederick I, Elector of Saxony and his brother William II, Margrave of Meissen, and originally comprised the four scholastic faculties. Since its inception, the university has engaged in teaching and research for over 600 years without interruption.
Lou Andreas-Salomé was a Russian-born psychoanalyst and a well-traveled author, narrator, and essayist from a French Huguenot-German family. Her diverse intellectual interests led to friendships with a broad array of distinguished thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Paul Rée, and Rainer Maria Rilke.
Galen John Strawson is a British analytic philosopher and literary critic who works primarily on philosophy of mind, metaphysics, John Locke, David Hume, Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche. He has been a consultant editor at The Times Literary Supplement for many years, and a regular book reviewer for The Observer, The Sunday Times, The Independent, the Financial Times and The Guardian. He is the son of philosopher P. F. Strawson. He holds a chair in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin, and taught for many years before that at the University of Reading, City University of New York, and Oxford University.
"God is dead" is a statement made by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. The first instance of this statement in Nietzsche's writings is in his 1882 The Gay Science, where it appears three times. The phrase also appears at the beginning of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits is a book by 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, originally published in 1878. A second part, Assorted Opinions and Maxims, was published in 1879, and a third part, The Wanderer and his Shadow, followed in 1880.
John Edward Sexton is an American legal scholar. He is the Benjamin F. Butler Professor of Law at New York University where he teaches at the law school and NYU's undergraduate colleges. Sexton served as the fifteenth president of NYU, from 2002 to 2015. During his time as president, NYU's stature rose dramatically into the ranks of the world's top universities, and it became the world's first global network university. Sexton has been called a "transformational" figure in higher education and was named by Time Magazine as one of the United States' 10 best college presidents.
Walter Arnold Kaufmann was a German-American philosopher, translator, and poet. A prolific author, he wrote extensively on a broad range of subjects, such as authenticity and death, moral philosophy and existentialism, theism and atheism, Christianity and Judaism, as well as philosophy and literature. He served more than 30 years as a professor at Princeton University.
Schulpforta, otherwise known as Pforta, is a school located in Pforta monastery, a former Cistercian monastery (1137–1540). The school is located near Naumburg on the Saale River in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt.
Victor J. Vitanza is a Professor of English at Clemson University. He is the former Director of the interdisciplinary-transdisciplinary Ph.D. program in Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design, which is situated in the College of Architecture, Arts, and Humanities.
Aribert Reimann was a German composer, pianist, and accompanist, known especially for his literary operas. His version of Shakespeare's King Lear, the opera Lear, was written at the suggestion of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who performed the title role. His opera Medea after Grillparzer's play premiered in 2010 at the Vienna State Opera. He was a professor of contemporary Lied in Hamburg and Berlin. In 2011, he was awarded the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize for his life's work.
Therese Elisabeth Alexandra Förster-Nietzsche was the sister of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and the creator of the Nietzsche Archive in 1894.
Günter Wilhelm Grass was a German novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, sculptor, and recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Siegfried Zielinski is a German media theorist. He held the chair for Media Theory: Archaeology and Variantology of the Media at Berlin University of the Arts, he is Michel Foucault Professor for Techno-Culture and Media Archaeology at the European Graduate School in Saas Fee, and he is director of the International Vilém-Flusser-Archive at the Berlin University of the Arts. In 2016 until March 2018, he succeeded Peter Sloterdijk as head of the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design.
Klaus Josef Stimeder, better known by the pseudonym JM Stim, is an Austrian author and a former journalist who lives in Los Angeles, California. In Germany, Switzerland, and Austria he became known as a War correspondent and as the founder and publisher of DATUM – Seiten der Zeit magazine. In the US and Canada he is mostly known for his 2011 book Here is Berlin.
Rüdiger Schmidt-Grépály is a German cultural manager and Director of the Kolleg Friedrich Nietzsche at the Klassik Stiftung Weimar.
Keith Ansell-Pearson is a British philosopher specialising in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. He is currently Professor of Philosophy at Warwick University.
Gene Andrew Jarrett is an American professor, literary scholar, and academic administrator. He is Dean of the Faculty and William S. Tod Professor of English at Princeton University.