Felix Kaufmann

Felix Kaufmann (4 July 1895, Vienna – 23 December 1949, New York City) was an Austrian-American philosopher of law. He studied jurisprudence and philosophy in Vienna, and became part of the legal-philosophical school of Hans Kelsen. From 1922 to 1938, he was a Privatdozent at the University of Vienna. During this time, Kaufmann was associated with the Vienna Circle. He also wrote on the foundations of mathematics, where, along with Hermann Weyl and Oskar Becker, he attempted to apply the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl to constructive mathematics. In 1938, facing increasingly difficult conditions for Jewish scholars, he emigrated to the USA. There, he taught as a law professor at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research until his death. Kaufmann also assisted fellow Austrian emigres in need during the pre-war years. In 1936, he published a book on the methodology of the social sciences, which was later translated and republished in English. After his move to the United States, he was invited to write a similar book in English, which resulted in a significantly different work influenced by John Dewey's "Logic: The Theory of Inquiry."