Gerd Buchdahl

Who was Gerd Buchdahl?

Gerd Buchdahl was a German-English philosopher of science, born to German-Jewish parents in Mainz. His younger brother, Hans Adolph Buchdahl also was a well-known physicsist.

The developing natural sciences were the causal lens through which he viewed and from which he wrote about the consequences on epistemology and the history of metaphysics. His book Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science. The classical origins: Descartes to Kant detailed interdependencies of philosophy, on one side, and on the other of practical and theoretical natural sciences. It influenced many scholars in their views about science and philosophy.

His book Kant and the Dynamics of Reason. Essays on the Structure of Kant's Philosophy shed light upon Kant's critical intellectualism in respect to the then contemporary developments in the sciences, especially for the anglophone world.

He was the first lecturer in history and philosophy of science at the University of Cambridge. A founding fellow of Darwin College, he became University Reader in 1966 and was the Tarner Lecturer at Trinity College in 1973, speaking on Science and rational structures.