Johannes Hessen

Johannes Hessen (Lobberich, Nettetal district, September 14, 1889 - Bad Honnef, September 2, 1971) was a German philosopher.

He sought to build a realist philosophy with the help of the main contributions of contemporary thought, such as phenomenology, neo-Kantianism and the objectivist theory of values. He addressed epistemology in his book Theory of Knowledge , a work widely disseminated in the Hispanic field, after being translated by the philosopher José Gaos.

Hessen speaking about epistemological issues describes dogmatism as: “that epistemological position for which the problem of knowledge does not yet exist. Dogmatism takes for granted the possibility and reality of contact between the subject and the object. It is understandable to him in itself that the subject, the knowing consciousness, apprehends the object of it. This position is based on a confidence in human reason, not yet weakened by any doubt.” This theory rests, in the opinion of this author, “on a deficient notion of the essence of knowledge” i> given that the “dogmatist” does not see that knowledge represents a relationship and, therefore, frees subject-object contact from any type of problem. Dogmatism should not be confused with epistemological realism.

In philosophy, the principle of causality, formulated by Hessen, consists of the application of the logical law of first principles to reality, and more specifically, to events in the world. However, the law of first principles is only a formulation of the fact that thought is subject to laws. The principle of causality states that the structure of being corresponds to the characteristic of thought. The need to think at the same time must be a need of being, thinking and being must coincide. This simply means that the world must be understandable.