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Scheler, Max (1874–1928) By Peterson, Paul Silas
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Scheler was a philosopher in the phenomenological school. His mother was Jewish; his father was Protestant. In high school he became a Catholic but abandoned formal religion in 1922. He studied with Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Simmel, and Rudolf Eucken. His early research was on transcendental philosophy. From 1900 to 1906 he was an outside lecturer (Privatdozent) in Jena and here engaged the work of Edmund Husserl. He was later active in Munich and Gottingen and from 1917 to 1918 at the German Foreign Ministry in Geneva and The Hague. From 1919 onward he was the director of the Institute for Social Sciences in Cologne.