Jacob Klein - Biography

Jacob Klein (March 3, 1899 – July 16, 1978) was a German-American philosopher and interpreter of Plato.

Biography

Klein was born in Liepāja, Latvia. He studied at Berlin and Marburg, where he received his Ph.D. in 1922. A student of Nicolai Hartmann, Martin Heidegger, and Edmund Husserl, he later taught at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland from 1937 until his death. He served as dean from 1949 to 1958.

Klein was affectionately known as Jasha, was Heidegger's star graduate student in philosophy and one of the world's preeminent interpreters of Plato and the Platonic tradition. He later served as dean at St. John's College after fleeing the Nazis, one of many Jewish scholars who were no longer safe in Europe. Simon Kaplan, a respected Jewish scholar in Russia, fled the Communists in similar fashion and later joined the faculty at St. John's as well.

Works

• A Commentary on Plato's Meno (University of North Carolina Press, 1965)
• Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra (MIT Press, 1968)
• Plato's Trilogy: Theaetetus, the Sophist, and the Statesman (University of Chicago Press, 1977)
• Jacob Klein: Lectures and Essays ed. by Robert Williamson and Elliott Zuckerman (St. John's College Press, 1985)

See also

• American philosophy
• List of American philosophers