Stephan Krner

that great revolution that you are always talking about going to happen?"). Despite an early wish to study philosophy, Stephan was dissuaded by his father, who feared that
his son would become a penniless academic; he was persuaded to study something more practical, and took his
degree in law at Charles University in Prague, completing it in 1935. (He practised law only briey but retained
a strong interest, attending seminars at Yale Law School
after his appointment as a visiting professor at Yale in the
1970s.) From 1936 to 1939 he carried out his military
service, serving as an ocer in the cavalry (see photograph).
After German troops moved into the country in March
1939, a schoolmate of his, an ocer in the SS, warned
the Jewish family that life in German-occupied Moravia
was no longer safe. His parents refused to leave, believing that they had nothing to fear since they were not communists. His mother died in 1941 after deportation to
Minsk Ghetto, Belarus, on Transport F, and his father
died in 1939, most likely by his own hand, during deportation to Nisko. His rst cousin Ruth Maier was one of
many other family members who died at Auschwitz, after her arrest in and deportation from Norway. She is remembered as Norways Anne Frank. Stephan travelled
with two friends, Otto Eisner and Willi Haas, through
Poland to the United Kingdom, arriving a refugee just
as the Second World War began. In Britain, he rejoined
the army of the migr Czechoslovak government; he saw
service with them during the Battle of France in 1940 before returning to Britain.

Stephan Krner

Stephan Krner, FBA (26 September 1913 17 August 2000[1] ) was a British philosopher, who specialised
in the work of Kant, the study of concepts, and in the
philosophy of mathematics. Born to a Jewish family in
Czechoslovakia, he left the country to avoid certain death
at the hands of the Nazis after the German occupation
in 1939, and came to the United Kingdom as a refugee,
where he began his study of philosophy; by 1952 he was a
professor of philosophy at the University of Bristol, taking up a second professorship at Yale in 1970. He was
married to Edith Krner, and was the father of the mathematician Thomas Krner and the biochemist, writer and
translator (ne) Ann M. Krner.

He received a small grant to continue his education at the

University of Cambridge, where he studied philosophy
under R. B. Braithwaite at Trinity Hall; among others,
he was taught by Ludwig Wittgenstein. Professor Braithwaite was exceedingly kind to his refugee student. On
one occasion, Braithwaite invited him to his home saying,
Someone has given me a Hungarian salami; would you
come to my house and show me how to eat it?" Such invitations were welcome since Stephan made little money
as a waiter in a Greek restaurant and survived on one
fourpenny meat pie per day. In 1943 he was recalled to
the Czechoslovak army, serving as a sergeant in the infantry during the push through France and into Germany.
He would later say that he survived the ghting outside
Dunkirk due to Dickens; recuperating in hospital from a
minor wound, a doctor refused to discharge him until he
had had another day to nish his novel. As a result, he
missed the heavy ghting the next day, when many of his
close friends were killed.

Early life

Krner was born in Ostrava, then part of AustriaHungary, in 1913, the son of a teacher of classics and
his wife. His father had studied classics in Vienna, while
at the same time, winning prizes in mathematics to supplement his meager income (a fellow student was a certain Leo Trotsky, who was frequently asked, When is
1

4 PERSONAL LIFE

He was awarded his PhD in 1944; shortly afterwards, he

married Edith Laner (Diti"; born Edita Leah Lwy; in
1938/39, her father changed the family name to Laner in
a vain attempt to deceive the Nazis into thinking that he
and his family were not Jewish), a fellow Czech refugee,
whom he had met in London in 1941. He remained in the
Czechoslovak army until 1946.

Academic career

After his army service, he worked at Cardi University, tutoring students in German. He took up his rst
academic post in 1947, lecturing in philosophy at the
University of Bristol; he worked ten or more hours a day,
six days a week, in what his son would describe as "[working] at philosophy like a man works at coal mining.[2]
Within six years, in 1952, he was appointed to the sole
professorship and chairmanship of his department, which
he would hold until 1979. In 1965 and 1966 he was Dean
of the Faculty of Arts, and from 1968 to 1971 a Pro-ViceChancellor.
During this time he worked as a visiting professor of philosophy at Brown University in 1957, Yale University in
1960, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in
1963, University of Texas at Austin in 1964 and Indiana
University in 1967. In 1970 he returned to Yale with
a tenured visiting professorship in philosophy, holding
it jointly with the Bristol post for nine years, and then
as his sole post from 1979 to 1984. Bristol appointed
him a professor emeritus on his retirement, and he subsequently held a visiting professorship at the University of
Graz from 1980 to 1989.
He received honorary doctorates from the Queens University Belfast in 1981, and Graz in 1984, where he was
appointed to an honorary professorship in 1986. Bristol
appointed him an honorary fellow in 1987, as did Trinity
Hall in 1991.
He was President of the British Society for the Philosophy
of Science in 1965, the Aristotelian Society in 1967, the
International Union of History and Philosophy of Science
in 1969, and the Mind Association in 1973. He edited the
journal Ratio from 1961 to 1980, and was on the editorial
board of Erkenntnis from 19741999. In 1967 he was
elected a Fellow of the British Academy.

Philosophical work

sial view that Kants categories apply directly to ordinary

empirical science, was little noticed by a public grateful
for any short work covering all of Kants philosophy.[3]
The second, Conceptual Thinking, was a more specialised
study, studying the way in which people deal with exact and inexact concepts exact concepts, like logical constructs or mathematical ideas, could be clearly dened, whilst inexact concepts, like 'colour', would always
have unclear boundaries. In 1957 he expanded on this,
editing Observation and Interpretation, a collection of papers arising from a seminar which brought together both
philosophers and physicists to discuss these questions.
His work led him into the philosophy of mathematics, on
which he would publish a textbook in 1960; Philosophy
of Mathematics took as its central theme the question of
how applied mathematics can be metaphysically possible.
He also wrote on the philosophy of science in Experience
and Theory (1966), including work on theoretical incommensurability, the concept that two directly contradictory
theories such as classical mechanics and relativity can
coexist, without either being specically wrong.
In 1969 he published What is Philosophy?, and in 1970
Categorial Frameworks, attempts to put forward his views
to a general audience. Experience and Conduct, published
in 1979, discussed how we evaluate and develop our
own preferences and value systems; his nal work, Metaphysics: Its Structure and Function (1984) was a wideranging study of metaphysics.

4 Personal life
Krner was remembered by colleagues and pupils as extraordinarily handsome with an astonishing Czech accent
... [with] a certain sense of grandeur about him.[4] He
retained an old-fashioned sense of manners, formal but
courteous, as well as a formal appearance. Even on the
hottest days, he was never seen without a tie and jacket.
He lived a happy and contented home life; he and Edith
were remembered by friends as exceptionally close and
devoted to one another. In their early married life they tted the conventional academic mould whilst he worked
incessantly at his studies, she raised the family, looked after the house, managed the nances but after the children had grown and left she worked at her own career,
eventually becoming the chairman of the magistrates
court in Bristol and overseeing the redevelopment of the
National Health Service's information-management system. Edith managed their lives, as with everything else,
in a practical, organised and forceful way, ensuring that
he could work as freely as possible; he was fond of saying
that Diti does everything, but leaves the philosophy to
me.

In 1955 he published his rst two major works. Kant,

an introduction for non-specialists to Immanuel Kant's
work, went through several impressions over the next
three decades and is still regarded as a minor classic in
the eld; it was one of the rst post-war books to reintro- The couple had two children Thomas, a professor of
duce Kant to the English-speaking world. The fact that mathematics, and Ann, a biochemist, writer and transin this and later works Korner put forward a controver- lator, who married Sidney Altman, a professor at Yale

3
University. In 1989, Professor Altman won the Nobel
Prize in Chemistry. Following Ediths diagnosis with advanced cancer in the summer of 2000, the two attempted
to commit suicide together. They were found, according
to the police report, with plastic bags tied around their
heads and pillows on top of them, that August after ftysix years of marriage; they were survived by both children and by four grandchildren, one of whom is Daniel
Altman.

Publications
Kant. 1955.
Conceptual Thinking. 1955.
(ed) Observation and Interpretation: a symposium of
philosophers and physicists. 1957.

Harrison, Andrew. In Memoriam: Stephan Krner

(19132000)". Ertkenntnis, vol. 55, no. 1, July
2001.
. Obituary: Stephan Korner.
Guardian, 30 August 2000.
Krner, Prof.
2005.

The

Stephan. In Whos Who 2006.

Philosopher Stephan Krner. Yale Bulletin, vol.

29, no. 2, 15 September 2000.
Professor Stephan Korner. The Times, 23 August
2000.

The Philosophy of Mathematics. 1960, Dover Publications, ISBN 0-486-25048-2.

Experience and Theory 1966.

Walker, Sophie. Together to the very end. Daily

Mail, 4 October 2000.

What is Philosophy?. 1969.

Categorial Frameworks. 1970.
(ed) Practical Reason. 1974.
(ed) Explanation. 1976.
Experience and Conduct. 1976.
Metaphysics: its structure and function. 1984.

See also
Schema (Kant)

Ahuja, Anjana. An organised death. The Times, 4

September 2000. (Electronic copy)

Tribute to Professor Stephan Krner, University

of Bristol Communications Oce, 19 September
2000.

Kants Conception of Freedom. 1967, Oxford University Press.

8 References

Notes

[1] Note that several contemporary news reports give 18 August, apparently in error.
[2] Thomas Krner, interview in the Daily Mail.
[3] S. Korner, Experience and Theory, New York: The Humanities Press, 1966, pp. 176178
[4] Dr. Andrew Harrison, quoted in the Times obituary (Professor Stephan Korner).

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