Axel Hägerström

Axel Anders Theodor Hägerström (6 September 1868 – 7 July 1939) was a Swedish philosopher. Born in Vireda, Jönköping County, Sweden, he was the son of a Church of Sweden pastor. As a student at Uppsala University, he gave up theology for a career in philosophy. Teaching there from 1893 until his retirement in 1933, he attacked the then dominant philosophical idealism of the followers of Christopher Jacob Boström (1797-1866). He is best known as a founder of the (quasi-) positivistic Uppsala school of philosophy—the Swedish counterpart of the Anglo-American Analytical Philosophy as well as of the Logical Positivism of the Vienna Circle—and as the founder of the Scandinavian legal realism movement. Some of his work was published by the Muirhead Library of Philosophy. He was Inspektor of the Östgöta nation from 1925 to his retirement in 1933. He died in Uppsala.