Rudolf Christoph Eucken (1846-1926)

Awarded the Prize “in recognition of his earnest search for truth, his penetrating power of thought, his wide range of vision, and the warmth and strength in presentation with which in his numerous works he has vindicated and developed an idealistic philosophy of life.”

German philosopher. Eucken was born in Aurich, Germany on January 5, 1846. He studied philosophy, philology, and history at the universities of Berlin and Gottingen, where he took his doctorate in 1866. He became a professor of philosophy at Basle in 1871 and from 1874 he held the chair of philosophy at Jena. He was once an exchange professor at Harvard and a visiting professor at Tokyo University. Eucken was an idealist philosopher, and he revised his books and brought them up to date over a period of several decades, so that some of his works ran into more than a dozen editions. He died in Jena on September 15, 1926.