METZGER, ARNOLD

METZGER, ARNOLD (1892–?), German scholar and author. Metzger was born in Landau in the Palatinate and began his career at the Hochshule fuer die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin, where he taught from 1934 to 1937. In the face of rising Nazism he escaped to England, and then spent time in the United States where he became associated with Simmons College, Boston. After the war he returned to Germany, accepting a professorship in philosophy at the University of Munich. Much of his writing treats those areas of philosophy that touch on psychology; his contributions center on the phenomenology of recollection, perception, and the longing for death. His early books include Phaenomenologie und Metaphysik (1933); better known are his works on free will and determinism, Freiheit und Tod (1955), on transcendentalism, Daemonie und Transzendenz (1964), and on the ramifications of technology for the human personality, Automation und Autonomie (1964). His later interests include existentialism, social philosophy, and the American pragmatic school in juxtaposition to the German metaphysical schools. In this connection he wrote "William James and the Crisis of Philosophy" (In Commemoration of William James, 1942). -ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: K. Bloch, Wir arbeiten im gleichen Bergwerk – Briefwechsel 1942–1972 Ernst Bloch und Arnold Metzger, 1987.