Korn, Alejandro
Korn, Alejandro
Born in San Vicente, Buenos Aires in 1860. Died in Buenos Aires, 1936. Psychiatrist in charge of Melchor Romero Hospital for the Insane and Professor of Anatomy at the National College of La Plata. Professor of Ethics and Metaphysics in the Universities of Buenos Aires and La Plata, from 1906-1930, and one time Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of Buenos Aires. Director of his own review, Valoraciones, and patriarch of the modern philosophical tradition of Argentine. The following may be considered his most important worksInfluencias Filosoficas en la Evolucion Nacional, 1919; La Libertad Creadora, 1922; Esquema Gnoseologico, 1924; El Concepto de Ciencia, 1926; Axiologia, 1930; Apuntes Filosoficos, 1935.
Korn’s philosophy represents an attack against naive and dogmatic positivism, but admits and even assimilates an element of Positivism which Korn calls Native Argentinian Positivism. Alejandro Korn may be called The Philosopher of Freedom. In fact, freedom is the keynote of his thought. He speaks of Human liberty as the indissoluble union of economic and ethical liberties. The free soul’s knowledge of the world of science operates mainly on the basis of intuition. In fact, intuition is the basis of all knowledge. “Necessity of the objective world order”, “Freedom of the spirit in the subjective realm”, “Identity”, ‘Purpose”, “Unity of Consciousness”, and other similar concepts, are “expressions of immediate evidence and not conclusions of logical dialectics”. The experience of freedom, according to Korn, leads to the problem of evaluation, which he defines as “the human response to a fact”, whether the fact be an object or an event. Valuation is an experience which grows out of the struggle for liberty. Values, therefore, are relative to the fields of experience in which valuation takes place. The denial of an absolute value or values, does not signify the exclusion of personal faith. On the contrary, personal, faith is the common ground and point of departure of knowledge and action. See Latin-American Philosophy. — J.A.F.