Günther Anders

Günther Anders (German: [ˈɡʏntɐ ˈandɐs]; born Günther Siegmund Stern, 12 July 1902 – 17 December 1992) was a German-born philosopher, journalist and critical theorist.

Trained as a philosopher in the phenomenological tradition, he obtained his doctorate under Edmund Husserl in 1923 and worked then as a journalist at the Berliner Börsen-Courier. At that time, he changed his name from Stern to Anders. He unsuccessfully tried to get a university tenure in the early 1930s and ultimately fled Nazism to the United States. Back in Europe in the 1950s, he published his major book, The Obsolescence of Man, in 1956.

An important part of Gunther Anders' work focuses on the self-destruction of mankind, through a meditation on the Holocaust and the nuclear threat. Anders developed a philosophical anthropology for the age of technology, dealing with such other themes as the effects of mass media on our emotional and ethical existence, the illogic of religion, and the question of being a thinker. He was awarded the Sigmund Freud Prize shortly before his death, in 1992.