Olga Plümacher

Olga Marie Pauline Plumächer (née Hünderwadel; 27 May 1839 – 1895) was a Swiss-American philosopher and scholar.

Olga Plumächer
Born
Olga Marie Pauline Hünderwadel

(1839-05-27)27 May 1839
St. Petersburg, Russia
Died1895 (aged 55–56)
Beersheba Springs, Tennessee, United States
Spouse(s)Eugene Hermann Plumächer
Era19th-century philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
SchoolPost-Schopenhauerian pessimism

Biography

Plumächer was born in St. Petersburg, Russia on 27 May 1839. She was the daughter of Gottlieb Samuel and Adelheid Hünderwadel (his cousin).[1] The family moved to Switzerland where her father managed a steel plant and later retired to Zürich, where Plumächer grew up.[1] She married a German sea captain, Eugene Hermann Plumächer who was U.S. Consul to Venezuela; they had two children.[1][2] Plumächer had no formal university education.[3]

Plumächer was friends with a former classmate who was the mother of the German playwright Frank Wedekind and introduced him to the philosophy of Eduard von Hartmann and Arthur Schopenhauer, of which Plumächer was a devotee; she has been described as his "philosophical aunt".[4][5]

Plumächer later emigrated with her family to the United States and lived in Beersheba Springs, Tennessee, where she published three books in Germany that engaged with the philosophical schools of von Hartmann and Schopenhauer.[1] These works made Plumächer a significant figure within the pessimism controversy in Germany: Der Kampf um's Unbewusste, Zwei Individualisten der Schopenhauer'schen Schule, and Der Pessimismus in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart.[6] Plumächer has been compared to Agnes Taubert, another largely forgotten German female philosopher who played large part in the pessimism controversy.[7] Plumächer also published several articles on psychology, philosophy and metaphysics in several German journals.[1] Additionally, she published an article on von Hartmann in English, in the Oxford journal Mind.[8][3]

Plumächer died in Tennessee, in 1895.[9]

Legacy

Rolf Kieser, a professor of German at the State University of New York, published a biography of Plumächer in 1990, Olga Plümacher-Hünerwadel, eine gelehrte Frau des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts.[4]

Bibliography
  • Der Kampf um's Unbewusste (The Struggle for the Subconscious; 1881)
  • Zwei Individualisten der Schopenhauer'schen Schule (Two Individualists from the Schopenhauer School; 1881)
  • Der Pessimismus in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (Pessimism in the Past and Present; 1883)

References
  1. Hunerwadel, Otto K (June 2008). Hunerwadel Family (PDF). pp. 1–2. Retrieved 2020-07-09.
  2. "Plumacher, Eugene Hermann, Papers, 1877-1947". Tennessee Secretary of State. 1970. Retrieved 2020-07-09.
  3. Beiser, Frederick C. (2016). After Hegel: German Philosophy, 1840–1900. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. p. 218. ISBN 978-0-691-17371-9.
  4. Jackson, Frances Helen (2010). The Swiss Colony at Gruetli (PDF) (2010 ed.). Gruetli-Laager, Tennessee: Grundy County Swiss Historical Society. p. 20.
  5. Hulle, Dirk Van; Nixon, Mark (2013). Samuel Beckett's Library. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 151. ISBN 978-1-107-00126-8.
  6. Beiser, Frederick C. (2016). Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860-1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 168. ISBN 978-0-19-876871-5.
  7. Roehr, Sabine (2015-10-27). "After Hegel: German Philosophy 1840–1900 by Frederick C. Beiser (review)". Journal of the History of Philosophy. 53 (4): 790–791. doi:10.1353/hph.2015.0073. ISSN 1538-4586.
  8. Beersheba Springs, A History (PDF). 1 (2017 ed.). Beersheba Springs, Tennessee: Beersheba Springs Historical Society. 2017. p. 21. Retrieved 2020-07-09.
  9. Kieser, Rolf (1990). Olga Plümacher-Hünerwadel: eine gelehrte Frau des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (in German). Switzerland: Lenzburger Druck. p. 62.
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