Rudolf Eisler

Rudolf Eisler (7 January 1873, Vienna – 14 December 1926, Vienna) was an Austrian Jewish philosopher.

Biography

Rudolf Eisler was born to a family of wealthy Jewish merchants.

As a student of Wilhelm Wundt, Rudolf Eisler studied philosophy in Leipzig and earned his Ph.D. there. In addition to Immanuel Kant, his philosophical writings, particularly those concerning phenomenalism, were largely influenced by Wundt, as well as Hermann Cohen and Edmund Husserl.

Upon moving to Vienna in 1901, he and his family settled in the "Matzos Quarter," a section of the city largely composed of working-class Jews. Due to his atheism, he was denied a teaching position at the University of Vienna. He found work as an editor for a series of books on philosophy and sociology for the publisher Werner Klinkhardt. His Grundlagen der Philosophie des Geisteslebens (Foundations of the Philosophy of the Spiritual Life, 1908) was an installment of that series. In 1907, along with the Marxist Max Adler, he founded the Vienna Sociological Society.