Agnes Taubert


Agnes Taubert was a German writer and philosopher.

Biography

Taubert was born in 1844, in Stralsund. She was the daughter of an artillery colonel, who was friends with the father of the philosopher Eduard von Hartmann. In 1872, Taubert married von Hartmann, in Berlin-Charlottenburg and had a child with him.
Taubert was a staunch supporter of her husband's work The Philosophy of the Unconscious and wrote two books which both critiqued and defended his ideas. Her work Pessimism and Its Opponents was a major influence on the pessimism controversy in Germany. In the text, she defined the problem that philosophical pessimism engages with as "a matter of measuring the eudaimonological value of life in order to determine whether existence is preferable to non-existence or not". Taubert has been described as "one of the first women to have a prominent role in a public intellectual debate in Germany" and has been compared to Olga Plümacher, a contemporary female philosopher, who also had a significant role in the pessimism controversy.
Taubert died in 1877, of "an attack of a rheumatism of the joints", which was described as "extremely painful".

Works