Elmar Holenstein

Elmar Holenstein was Full Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Humanities at the ETH Zurich from 1990 to 2002. He retired in April 2002.

Prof. Holenstein was born on January 7, 1937 in Gossau SG. He studied philosophy, psychology and linguistics at the Universities of Leuven, Heidelberg and Zurich. He earned his doctorate at the University of Leuven in 1970 with a dissertation on the phenomenology of prelinguistic experience. He completed his habilitation in 1976 at the University of Zurich with a book on the "phenomenological structuralism" of Roman Jakobson. During this time and later he was a scientific researcher at the Husserl Archives in Leuven, at the Institute for Linguistics of the University of Cologne, at the Universities of Harvard, Hawaii, and Stanford and at the Institute for the Studies of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa in Tokyo. From 1977 to 1990 he was Professor of Philosophy at the Ruhr University in Bochum. in 1986/87 he was a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo and in 2004 Tang Chung-I Visiting Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

His focus of research was on philosophical psychology (body/soul problem, the contrast between natural and artificial intelligence) and on cultural philosophy (elaborating simultaneously intercultural invariants and intracultural variations).

His newest book is Philosophie-Atlas (Ammann, Zurich 2005), a guide through the geography of philosophical movements.