ABSTRACT
Walter Kaufmann was born in Freiburg, Germany on July 1, 1921. His upbringing was Protestant, though all four of his grandparents were Jewish; a fact which gave Kaufmann a direct connection to the Jewish religious tradition and was also to lead to difficulties for him and his family in the years leading up to and during World War II. In an article published in Harper’s Weekly in 1959, Kaufmann explains his religious development, which took him from Protestantism through a conversion to Judaism and finally to the realization, in 1939 as a newly arrived 17-year-old college student at Williams College in Williamston, Massachusetts in the United States, that he could not believe in the God of Jewish tradition either. This final realization resulted in a religious outlook that might be called “qualified agnosticism” or, as Kaufmann himself described it, “the faith of a heretic.”2 Kaufmann completed his Bachelor of Arts at Williams College with a major in philosophy in 1941 and, remaining in the United States, began graduate studies at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1942. Shortly after this Kaufmann enrolled for military service and served in World War II from 1943 to 1946. After the war he returned to Harvard and completed his Ph.D. thesis, Nietzsche’s Theory of Values, in 1947. In the same year he became a member of the faculty of philosophy at Princeton University in New Jersey. Though travelling often, including a Fulbright award for research at Heidelberg in 1955-56, which was the occasion of some interactions with Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), and a visiting professorship in Jerusalem in
1975, Kaufmann remained at Princeton teaching and doing research until his death on September 4, 1980 at the age of 59.
