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Ernest André Gellner (9 December 1925 – 5 November 1995) was a British-Czech philosopher and social anthropologist described by ''The Daily Telegraph'', when he died, as one of the world's most vigorous intellectuals, and by ''The Independent'' as a "one-man crusade for critical rationalism". His first book, ''Words and Things'' (1959), prompted a leader in ''The Times'' and a month-long correspondence on its letters page over his attack on linguistic philosophy. As the Professor of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics for 22 years, the William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge for eight years, and head of the new Centre for the Study of Nationalism in Prague, Gellner fought all his life—in his writing, teaching and political activism—against what he saw as closed systems of thought, particularly communism, psychoanalysis, relativism and the dictatorship of the free market. Among other issues in social thought, modernization theory and nationalism were two of his central themes, his multicultural perspective allowing him to work within the subject-matter of three separate civilizations: Western, Islamic, and Russian. He is considered one of the leading theoreticians on the issue of nationalism. ==Background== Gellner was born in Paris〔Chris Hann, (Obituary ), ''The Independent'', 8 November 1995〕 to Anna, née Fantl, and Rudolf, a lawyer, an urban intellectual German-speaking Jewish couple from Bohemia (which, since 1918, was part of the newly established Czechoslovakia). Julius Gellner was his uncle. He was brought up in Prague, attending a Czech language primary school before entering the English-language grammar school. This was Franz Kafka's tricultural Prague: antisemitic but stunningly beautiful, a city he later spent years longing for.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Gellner Interview )〕 In 1939, when Gellner was 13, the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany persuaded his family to leave Czechoslovakia and move to St Albans, just north of London, where Gellner attended St Albans School. At the age of 17, he won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford as a result of what he called "Portuguese colonial policy", which involved keeping "the natives peaceful by getting able ones from below into Balliol."〔 At Balliol, he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) and specialised in philosophy. He interrupted his studies after one year to serve with the 1st Czechoslovak Armoured Brigade, which took part in the Siege of Dunkirk (1944–45), and then returned to Prague to attend university there for half a term. During this period, Prague lost its strong hold over him: foreseeing the communist takeover, he decided to return to England. One of his recollections of the city in 1945 was a communist poster saying: "Everyone with a clean shield into the Party", ostensibly meaning that those whose records were good during the occupation were welcome. In reality, Gellner said, it meant exactly the opposite: He returned to Balliol College in 1945 to finish his degree, winning the John Locke prize and taking first class honours in 1947. The same year, he began his academic career at the University of Edinburgh as an assistant to Professor John Macmurray in the Department of Moral Philosophy. He moved to the London School of Economics in 1949, joining the sociology department under Morris Ginsberg. Ginsberg admired philosophy and believed that philosophy and sociology were very close to each other. Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse had preceded Ginsberg as Martin White Professor of Sociology at the LSE. Hobhouse's ''Mind in Evolution'' (1901) had proposed that society should be regarded as an organism, a product of evolution, with the individual as its basic unit, the subtext being that society would improve over time as it evolved, a teleological view that Gellner firmly opposed. Gellner's critique of linguistic philosophy in ''Words and Things'' (1959) focused on J. L. Austin and the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, criticizing them for failing to question their own methods. The book brought Gellner critical acclaim. He obtained his Ph. D. in 1961 with a thesis on ''Organization and the Role of a Berber Zawiya'' and became Professor of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method just one year later. ''Thought and Change'' was published in 1965, and in ''State and Society in Soviet Thought'' (1988), he examined whether Marxist regimes could be liberalized. He was elected to the British Academy in 1974. He moved to Cambridge in 1984 to head the Department of Anthropology, holding the William Wyse chair and becoming a fellow of King's College, Cambridge, which provided him with a relaxed atmosphere where he enjoyed drinking beer and playing chess with the students. Described by the ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'' as "brilliant, forceful, irreverent, mischievous, sometimes perverse, with a biting wit and love of irony", he was famously popular with his students, was willing to spend many extra hours a day tutoring them, and was regarded as a superb public speaker and gifted teacher.〔 His ''Plough, Sword and Book'' (1988) investigated the philosophy of history, and ''Conditions of Liberty'' (1994) sought to explain the collapse of socialism. In 1993, he returned to Prague, now rid of communism, and to the new Central European University, where he became head of the Center for the Study of Nationalism, a program funded by George Soros, the American billionaire philanthropist, to study the rise of nationalism in the post-communist countries of eastern and central Europe.〔(Nationalism Studies Program ) at the CEU〕 On 5 November 1995, after returning from a conference in Budapest, he suffered a heart attack and died at his flat in Prague, one month short of his 70th birthday. Gellner was noted for his questionable sense of humour. His daughter, Sarah Gellner, revealed that one of her father's favourite jokes was "Rape, rape, rape, all summer long", and that "If there was one thing Dad disliked more than feminists, it was homosexual men." 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Ernest Gellner」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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