Richard David Precht

His father, Hans-Jürgen Precht, was born in Hanover in 1933, and his mother in Neuhof bei Berlin in 1938.

After higher secondary schooling Abitur at the Gymnasium Schwertstraße in Solingen, Precht did his alternative service as a parish worker.

Later he studied philosophy, German studies and history of art at the University of Cologne.

Simultaneously, he reviews the global political events in West Germany and East Germany in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s and describes political attitudes, ideological mindsets as well as details of an everyday life in this era.

The book received numerously positive critics and it was filmed with the support of WDR, SWR and the Filmstiftung Nordrhein-Westfalen.

Richard David Precht (born 8 December 1964) is a German philosopher and author of successful popular science books about philosophical issues.

He hosts the TV show "Precht" on ZDF.

The novel opens in year 1985 and uses the Danish island Lilleö (in reality: Ærø) as a backdrop for a complicated web of analogies and motives, for example the relation between theology and policework.

On the surface, the novel is a detective story about a sunken ship and a homicide from a long time ago.

The novel deals in its more profound significance with the order of things.

Even the philosopher Michel Foucault appears in the shape of the conservator Mikkel Folket.

From 1991 to 1995 he worked as a scientific assistant in a cognitive science research project.

In 1994, he obtained a doctorate (Dr. phil.) in German studies.

Precht's 1994 PhD dissertation "Die gleitende Logik der Seele. Ästhetische Selbstreflexivität in Robert Musils 'Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften'", is a phenomenological analysis of effective structures in Musil's book.

In 1997, Precht was Arthur F. Burns Fellow at Chicago Tribune.

Two years later, Precht received the Heinz-Kühn-Scholarship.

In 1997, Precht's Noahs Erbe was published.

The book deals with the ethical question in relation between humans and animals as well as their social consequences.

As a result, he pleads for a change in the treatment of animals on the basis of a "ethic of nescience".

In 1999, Precht together with his brother Georg Jonathan wrote the detective Bildungsroman Das Schiff im Noor.

In 2000–01, he was Fellow at the European College of Journalism, and in 2001, he was awarded for journalism in the field of biomedical studies.

As an essayist, Precht has written for German newspapers and magazines.

From 2002 to 2004 he was a columnist of Literaturen, a sophisticated intellectual literary magazine, and from 2005 to 2008 he was freelance moderator of Tageszeichen, a broadcast program of WDR.

Precht has a son and three stepchildren.

Precht has had success with literary works as well as non-fiction.

The novel Die Kosmonauten from 2002 deals with the love story and finding of identity of Georg and Rosalie in their late twenties where they had got to know each other in Cologne and shortly afterwards moved together to Berlin in the post-reunification period 1990–91.

They first live the life of Bohemians in Berlin-Mitte from which Rosalie increasingly distances herself over the course of the story.

She changes her mindset, falls in love with another man and parts from Georg to have a bourgeois lifestyle.

At the end of the novel their common friend Leonhard is killed in a tragic accident.

Parallel to this story, Precht recounts in short the tragic destiny of Sergei Krikalev, the last cosmonaut of the Soviet Union.

In 2005, Precht published his autobiographical book Lenin kam nur bis zum Lüdenscheid – Meine kleine deutsche Revolution in which he recalls from a child's perspective his childhood in the 1970s within a leftwing family who stands close to the party DKP.

In 2008, the film came out in many German repertory cinemas and reached 20,000 viewers.

The novel was republished in 2009 with the original planned name Die Instrumente des Herrn Jörgensen.

He was an honorary professor of philosophy at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg from 2011 to October 2023 and is an honorary professor of philosophy and aesthetics at the Hanns Eisler University of Music in Berlin.

Since the great success with Wer bin ich – und wenn ja, wie viele? (English title: Who am I – and if so, how many?), Precht's books on philosophical or sociopolitical topics became bestsellers.

Richard David Precht was born and raised in Solingen.

Originally planned as an introduction to philosophy for young people, Precht's most successful work, the non-fiction Wer bin ich – und wenn ja, wie viele? (English: "Who am I – and if so, how many?"; release of the English version in April 2011) was published in 2007.

It is an introduction to philosophy linking the results of brain research, psychology, behaviour research and other sciences.

The book is structured according to Kant's classification: What can I know?

What ought I to do?