Jacob Klein was a German-American philosopher and interpreter of Plato

Plato

Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...

.

Biography

Klein was born in Liepāja

Liepaja

Liepāja ; ), is a republican city in western Latvia, located on the Baltic Sea directly at 21°E. It is the largest city in the Kurzeme Region of Latvia, the third largest city in Latvia after Riga and Daugavpils and an important ice-free port...

, Latvia

Latvia

Latvia , officially the Republic of Latvia , is a country in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by Estonia , to the south by Lithuania , to the east by the Russian Federation , to the southeast by Belarus and shares maritime borders to the west with Sweden...

. He studied at Berlin

Berlin

Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...

 and Marburg

Marburg

Marburg is a city in the state of Hesse, Germany, on the River Lahn. It is the main town of the Marburg-Biedenkopf district and its population, as of March 2010, was 79,911.- Founding and early history :...

, where he received his Ph.D.

Ph.D.

A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...

 in 1922. A student of Nicolai Hartmann

Nicolai Hartmann

-Biography:Hartmann was born of German descent in Riga, which was then the capital of the Russian province of Livonia, and which is now in Latvia. He studied Medicine at the University of Tartu , then Philosophy in St. Petersburg and at the University of Marburg in Germany, where he took his Ph.D....

, Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."...

, and Edmund Husserl

Edmund Husserl

Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a philosopher and mathematician and the founder of the 20th century philosophical school of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, yet he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic...

, he later taught at St. John's College

St. John's College, U.S.

St. John's College is a liberal arts college with two U.S. campuses: one in Annapolis, Maryland and one in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Founded in 1696 as a preparatory school, King William's School, the school received a collegiate charter in 1784, making it one of the oldest institutions of higher...

in Annapolis, Maryland from 1937 until his death. He served as dean from 1949 to 1958.

Klein was affectionately known as Jasha, was Heidegger's star graduate student in philosophy and one of the world's preeminent interpreters of Plato and the Platonic tradition. He later served as dean at St. John's College after fleeing the Nazis, one of many Jewish scholars who were no longer safe in Europe. Simon Kaplan, a respected Jewish scholar in Russia, fled the Communists in similar fashion and later joined the faculty at St. John's as well.

Works

• A Commentary on Plato's Meno (University of North Carolina Press, 1965)
• Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra (MIT Press, 1968)
• Plato's Trilogy: Theaetetus, the Sophist, and the Statesman (University of Chicago Press, 1977)
• Jacob Klein: Lectures and Essays ed. by Robert Williamson and Elliott Zuckerman (St. John's College Press, 1985)