A pioneering German phenomenologist, ethicist, and social philosopher, Max Scheler was born in Munich in 1874. His father was Lutheran, his mother was Jewish; Scheler himself, ever independent, embraced Catholicism. After studying with Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Simmel, he earned his doctorate in 1897 under Rudolf Eucken in Jena, where he taught until 1906. From 1907 he taught in Munich, where he met Franz Brentano and several disciples of Edmund Husserl, the father of the phenomenological movement. He soon became acquainted with a growing circle of phenomenologists from Munich and Göttingen, including Moritz Geiger (1880–1937), Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889–1977), Alexander Pfänder, Adolf Reinach (1883–1917), Edith Stein, and others. But as early as 1901, when he first met Husserl, Scheler had already taken an independent phenomenological direction of his own.

In 1910 Scheler lost his post in Munich after a divorce alienated him from the Catholic university administration. In 1912, he married M...