Philosophies of Life

“Philosophy of life” is currently employed as a synonym or as a hyponym of “vitalism,” “philosophy of nature,” and “biological philosophy,” labeling texts produced in completely different historical, geographic, and disciplinary contexts and bearing only certain family resemblances. The expressions “Philosophie des Lebens” and “Lebensphilosophie” first appeared during the 1770s in the writings of mutually independent, non-academic German authors linked to the Romantic movement, such as Karl Philipp Moritz (1756–1793). Starting from the 1910s, they re-emerged in two essays written respectively by the Neo-Kantian philosopher Heinrich Rickert (1863–1936) and by the phenomenologist Max Scheler (1874–1928).