A Brief Introduction to Josef Seifert's Phoilosophy

Abstract

In this text, I will sketch a brief outline of Josef Seifert’s philosophy as an introduction to the excellent volume that Journal of East-West Thought has so timely dedicated to his figure. The Austrian professor Josef Seifert (Seekirchen am Wallersee, Salzburg, 1945) is one of the most important and influential thinkers of the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. His style and vision represent, without doubt, one of the most important philosophical paradigms in recent history.
His formative years from adolescence and throughout university were marked by the key influence of Dietrich von Hildebrand, eminent philosopher of the Göttingen Circle, whose deployment of phenomenology from a realist standpoint would always remain a source of inspiration. Alongside von Hildebrand, Seifert’s friend Baldwin Schwartz was also a great influence. Schwarz attempted to reintroduce phenomenology in Austria from the same perspective of going “back to things themselves”, through an Academy of Philosophy for which there was little appreciation at a time when the country’s cultural climate showed more interest in absorbing Wittgenstein’s legacy.