Agnes Taubert
Agnes Marie Constanze von Hartmann, who wrote under the names A. T. and A. Taubert, was a German philosopher associated with Post-Schopenhauerian pessimism. Born in Stralsund and later based in Berlin, she married the philosopher Eduard von Hartmann in 1872 and became an advocate for his Philosophy of the Unconscious. She published two books that both defended and criticised Hartmann's ideas, Philosophie gegen naturwissenschaftliche Ueberhebung and Der Pessimismus und seine Gegner ; Frederick C. Beiser writes that the use of a pen name meant her work was received as if it had been written by a man. Beiser credits her books as playing a significant role in the German pessimism controversy, and has described Taubert as "one of the first women to have a prominent role in a public intellectual debate in Germany". Carol Bensick has compared Taubert with Olga Plümacher and Amalie J. Hathaway.
Biography
Early and personal life
Agnes Marie Constanze Taubert was born on 7 January 1844 in Stralsund, Kingdom of Prussia, to Albert Hartmann Taubert and Friederike Agnes Wilhelmine Taubert. She was baptised on 1 February in Pommern. Her father was an artillery colonel, who was acquainted with the father of the philosopher Eduard von Hartmann. In 1872, she married von Hartmann in Berlin-Charlottenburg, and the couple had one child.Career
Taubert supported her husband's work, Philosophy of the Unconscious and wrote two books under the pen names A. T. and A. Taubert, respectively, both criticising and defending his ideas. Frederick C. Beiser asserts that publishing under a pen name meant she was not identified as a woman philosopher and her work was received as if it had been written by a man.Beiser argues that Taubert's books, Philosophie gegen naturwissenschaftliche Ueberhebung and Der Pessimismus und seine Gegner, played a significant role in the pessimism controversy in Germany, according to Frederick C. Beiser. According to Von Hartmann's publisher, Carl Heymons, Taubert was closely involved in planning and managing Hartmann's responses to his critics during the controversy.
In her work, she defined the central problem of philosophical pessimism as "a matter of measuring the eudaimonological value of life in order to determine whether existence is preferable to non-existence or not." Like her husband, she argued that the question could be addressed through empirical observation.
Death
Taubert died in Berlin on 8 May 1877, aged 33, of "an attack of a rheumatism of the joints", which was described as "extremely painful".Legacy
Taubert has been described by Frederick C. Beiser as "one of the first women to have a prominent role in a public intellectual debate in Germany". Beiser has also referred to Taubert and Olga Plümacher as forgotten philosophers of the late 19th century. In a 2018 post for the American Philosophical Association, Carol Bensick compared Taubert with Plümacher and Amalie J. Hathaway in the context of the pessimism controversy.Beiser contributed a chapter on Taubert and Plümacher, titled "Two Female Pessimists", to the 2024 volume The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century Women Philosophers in the German Tradition.
In 2023, Ediciones Sequitur published a Spanish translation of Taubert's Der Pessimismus und seine Gegner, titled El pesimismo y sus adversarios.