Max Scheler

Max Scheler was the German phenomenologist who extended Husserl's method into ethics, the emotions, and philosophical anthropology — the thinker Husserl himself called the greatest philosopher in Germany after Kant. His Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values argued against Kant that moral values are not constructed by reason but are directly intuited through emotional acts.

Scheler developed a hierarchical theory of values — with pleasure and utility at the base and holiness at the summit — providing phenomenology's most systematic account of moral experience. His Nature of Sympathy distinguished empathy, fellow-feeling, and love with extraordinary precision. His philosophical anthropology, in Man's Place in Nature, asked what distinguishes human beings from other animals and answered with the concept of "spirit" — the capacity to say no to instinct. His early death at fifty-four cut short one of the most fertile minds of his generation.