ABSTRACT
Nicolai Hartmann was born at Riga, Latvia, on February 20, 1882, to Karl August, a merchant, and Helene, daughter of a pastor. After graduation from the Gymnasium, he studied medicine in Dorpat in Estonia and, later, classical philology and philosophy in Marburg, a university town in Hesse, Germany. In 1920 Hartmann became professor of philosophy at Marburg; a profession that helped him thinks dispassionately and analyze philosophically his dehumanizing experiences of war. Consequently Hartmann wrote a three-volume work on the ethos of mankind called Ethik, criticizing the Kantian ethics of categorical imperatives, thereby giving a message to the world that it is possible to put humanity back onto the right track in spite of the wounds of war. Hartmann's ethics projects a picture of a moral world that is free from the determinisms of all kind: Kantian, teleological, and axiological. Hartmann successfully vindicated ontology as worthy of a scientific study of being to his contemporaries who treated it cavalierly.
