Robert S. Hartman
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Robert Schirokauer Hartman (January 27, 1910 - September 20, 1973) was a logician and philosopher. His primary field of study was scientific axiology and he is known as the original theorist of the science of value. His axiology is the basis of the Hartman Value Inventory which is used in psychology to measure the character of an individual.
Robert S. Hartman spent his later days as simultaneously a Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tennessee as well as at the National University of Mexico. He was born in Germany, and studied at the German College of Political Science, and also at the University of Paris, the London School of Economics, and at the University of Berlin, from which he received an LL.B. degree.
He became an instructor in the philosophy of law at the University of Berlin and also an Assistant Judge at the District Court, Berlin-Charlottenburg. Subsequently he became a businessman, serving as reprsentative of the Walt Disney Company, first in Scandinavia, later in Central America. In 1941 he migrated to the United States, became a citizen, and did his doctoral work in philosophy at Northwestern University in 1946. He has taught at the University of Berlin, at Lake Forest Academy near Chicago, at the College of Wooster, Ohio State University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, before assuming duties in Mexico. In 1955-1956 he was Visiting Professor at Yale University.
As the author of more than ten books and over 100 articles, and translator of six books, he acquired a world-wide reputation.
His life-long quest was to answer the question, "What is good?" -- and to answer the question in such a way that good could be organized to help preserve and enhance the value of human life. He believed that he had found this answer in the axiom upon which he based his science of Axiology, "A thing is good when it fulfills its concept." His formal axiology, as the ordering logic for the value sciences, receives its most complete expression in his major work, The Structure of Value: Foundations of Scientific Axiology (1967), which one reviewer described as "one of the most constructive and revolutionary undertakings suggested in modern times."
From 1950-1957 he was Chairman of the Commission on Peace, International Council of Community Churches. He served as Executive Director of the Council of Profit-Sharing Industries, and wrote its first manual. He was a founder of the Deutsche Institute fur Social-Wirtschaftliche Betriebsgestaltung (industrial organization).
He served as consultant for the practical application of Value Theory with AT&T, General Foods, General Electric, and IBM.
He was the subject of doctoral dissertations, including that of a former Chairman of the Philosophy Department at the University of Tennessee, Professor John Davis, as well as of Dr. Marvin Charles Katz, whose thesis was later published as a book entitled Trends Towards Synthesis.
Among Hartman's publications are the report on Value Theory for the Institut International de Philosophis 1949-1955, published by UNESCO; his magnum opus The Structure of Value (1967 Southern Illinois University Press); and at the time of his death in 1973 he was working on a manuscript entitled The Measurement of Value. He has published papers on the phenomenology of group measurement, on universal constants in Physics (in his role as a philosopher of science), on the logic of description and valuation, on the contribution of St. Anselm, and on the Concept of Self in Soren Kierkegaard.
He was a founding sponsor of the American Association for Humanistic Psychology. He has been credited with being the founding spirit behind the prevailing business-retirement plan in the United States today, the 401K Plan.[1] He was the first President of the American Society for Value Inquiry, founded in 1971 by Dr. James Wilbur. The reference book Who Knows What listed Dr. Hartman as one of the two living authorities on value theory (the other was Dr. Charles Morris (1901-1979)). Hartman was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973. An Institute has been set up in his honor to explore the implications of his work in formal axiology and value science.
