Walter Kaufmann

Walter Arnold Kaufmann (1921–1980) was a German-born American philosopher who spent most of his career at Princeton University. Raised in a Jewish family that had converted to Lutheranism, he reconverted to Judaism in adolescence and later moved toward a secular humanism deeply informed by existentialist thought. After fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939, he studied at Williams College and Harvard, completing a dissertation on Nietzsche.

Kaufmann is best known for rehabilitating Friedrich Nietzsche for English-speaking readers through his translations and his landmark study Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1950), which sought to dissociate Nietzsche from Nazi appropriation. He also produced influential translations of Hegel, Goethe, Buber, and the existentialists, and edited the anthology Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (1956).

On the question of God, Kaufmann was a sharp critic of theology and organized religion. In Critique of Religion and Philosophy (1958), The Faith of a Heretic (1961), and Religions in Four Dimensions (1976), he attacked theological evasion, defended intellectual honesty as a cardinal virtue, and argued against theodicy and afterlife belief. He embraced a tragic, this-worldly humanism drawn from Nietzsche, the Hebrew prophets, and Greek tragedy.

Critics, including some analytic philosophers of religion, judged his treatments polemical and insufficiently engaged with technical arguments; defenders praise their literary force and moral seriousness.