Paul-Louis Landsberg

Though the two key works above have been translated into English, they had been out of publication for several decades before their republication by Living Time World Thought in 2001. According to their website The Academy of the 3rd Millennium (A3M) is publishing The Essence and Meaning of the Platonic Academy as the introductory essay for a volume of Platonic Dialogues on the topic of education in April 2014. For an example of the discussion of Landsberg's contribution to the philosophy of death in recent literature see Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy by Bernard N. Schumacher (2010). For an instance of his influence on Phenomenology see the Phenomenology of Life - From the Animal Soul to the Human Mind. For an account of his impact on bio-ethics, see the book The Least Worst Death: Essays in Bioethics on the End of Life by M. Pabst Battin.

Landsberg was hounded by the Gestapo for most of his life, both because of his Jewish family background and due to his expression of Anti-Nazi sentiments. He was captured by the Gestapo and deported to Oranienburg Concentration Camp towards the end of the war and died there of physical and mental exhaustion in April 1944.

Ultimately, Jacques Thérond, who heads the 'groupe Esprit' installs Landsberg at a hotel with papers under the name of 'Richert'. Against all odds he succeeds in finding his wife, joins a local combat group and evades anti-semitic persecution for some time. However, in March 1943 he is arrested as a Resistance fighter and as being of Jewish origin. He is deported to the concentration camp at Oranienburg, outside Berlin and is recorded as having died of exhaustion on 2 April 1944 while still incarcerated.

However, due to his opposition to Nazism, he fled Germany just before the coming to power of Hitler in 1933. By the beginning of March 1933, he had emigrated to Spain and began teaching Philosophy there. During this period he was studying the Mystics of the 16th century. Between 1934 and 1936 he held positions at the Complutense University of Madrid and the University of Barcelona, where his thought began to exert a great influence over his pupils, and where it is still studied avidly to this day.

Landsberg lectured at the Universities of Bonn, Madrid and Paris, among others. He was a pupil of Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler, continuing their work in Phenomenology to tackle several vital subjects, including personal identity, death and suicide. He was a close friend of the Christian Existentialist Emmanuel Mounier and a key contributor to the philosophical journal Esprit (1913-2013).

With the coming of the Civil War in Spain, Landsberg transferred to Paris where he began giving courses at the University of the Sorbonne on the Meaning of Existence. It was at this time that he also became deeply involved with the journal Esprit (1913-2013) through which channel his thought gradually became disseminated.

Paul-Louis Landsberg (3 December 1901 – 2 April 1944) was a twentieth century Existentialist philosopher who is known for his works The Experience of Death and The Moral Problem of Suicide.

Paul-Louis Landsberg was born in 1901 at Bonn into a large, wealthy Jewish family, the son of the prominent German Jurist Ernst Landsberg and his wife Anna. His parents had him baptized as a Protestant but later on he turned towards Catholicism and allied himself with the benedictine liturgical movement centered around Maria Laach. He was a pupil of the phenomenological philosophers Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger (in Freiburg) and Max Scheler. Though he studied with the latter-most in Cologne, he moved back to his birth-town to become Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bonn.