Lazarus Geiger

Lazarus Geiger (1829–1870) was a German Jewish philosopher and philologist.

Life

He was born at Frankfort-on-Main, was destined to commerce, but soon gave himself up to scholarship and studied at Marburg, Bonn and Heidelberg. From 1861 till his sudden death in 1870 he was professor in the Jewish high school at Frankfort. His chief aim was to prove that the evolution of human reason is closely bound up with that of language. He further maintained that the origin of the Indo-Germanic language is to be sought not in Asia but in central Germany. He was a convinced opponent of rationalism in religion. His chief work was his Ursprung und Entwickelung der menschlichen Sprache und Vernunft (vol. i., Stuttgart, 1868), the principal results of which appeared in a more popular form as Der Ursprung der Sprache (Stuttgart, 1869 and 1878). The second volume of the former was published in an incomplete form (1872, 2nd ed. 1899) after his death by his brother Alfred Geiger, who also published a number of his scattered papers as Zur Entwickelung der Menschheit (1871, and ed. 1878; Eng. trans. D. Asher, Hist. of the Development of the Human Race, Lond., 1880).

Bibliography

See L. A. Rosenthal, Lazarus Geiger: seine Lehre vom Ursprung d. Sprache und Vernunft und sein Leben (Stuttgart, 1883); E. Peschier, L. Geiger, sein Leben und Denken (1871); J. Keller, L. Geiger und d. Kritik d. Vernunft (Wertheim, 1883) and Der Ursprung d. Vernunft (Heidelberg, 1884).

Lazarus Geiger, Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der Menschheit. Vorträge, Stuttgart: Cotta 1871,

References

Attribution

•  Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). "Geiger, Abraham". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 

External links

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.