Paul Gerhard Natorp

Paul Gerhard Natorp (1854–1924) was a German philosopher and educationalist, and one of the co-founders of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism. He was known as an authority on Plato. Born in Düsseldorf, he studied music, history, classical philology, and philosophy in Berlin, Bonn, and Strasbourg. He completed his doctoral dissertation in 1876 at the University of Strasbourg under Ernst Laas and his Habilitation in 1881 under Hermann Cohen. In 1885, he became an extraordinary professor and in 1893 an ordinary professor in philosophy and pedagogy at Marburg University, a position he held until his retirement in 1922. Natorp had an intensive exchange of ideas with Martin Heidegger in 1923-24. He was married with five children and was also an ambitious composer of chamber music and songs. His students included Ernst Cassirer, Karl Barth, and Boris Pasternak, and he profoundly affected Edmund Husserl's thought.