Paris, March 1975. Johannes Heinrichs is working on the question of how the encounter of two people can be described when the other is not an object but a subject in his own right. He finds four stages: I perceive the other. I notice that he perceives me. We both notice that the other notices it. And something shared arises that neither has produced alone.

Over fifty years this observation has grown into a body of work of more than forty books: a philosophy of language in five volumes, a theory of action with 256 classes of action, a theory of society, a theory of democracy with a worked-out draft constitution, a philosophy of nature and, most recently, an ontology. Most people have never heard of him.

Kai Froeb’s book The Discovery of Johannes Heinrichs goes through this work field by field and, for each field, names the book in which it is worked out. Wherever possible, it shows the matter in something the reader does himself, for what Heinrichs found in his own enactment, anyone can check in their own. A table at the beginning says where to start depending on where you come from: from politics, with democracy; from language, with conversation; from Kant or Hegel, with the systematic theory.

The book appears in the Johannes Heinrichs Edition, in the sub-series “Introductions and applications by other authors”, under the Zero Marginal Cost License: free to read and to pass on for non-commercial purposes.

→ The Discovery of Johannes Heinrichs

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