Oswald Hanfling

Oswald Hanfling (21 December 1927 – 25 October 2005) was a German philosopher who worked from 1970, until his death, at the Open University in the UK.

Oswald Hanfling was born in Berlin in 1927. His parents were Jewish and when their business was vandalised on Kristallnacht in 1938, he was sent to England by Kindertransport and lived in Bedford with a foster family. After the Second World War, he traced his family to Israel, with the help of the Red Cross.

Hanfling left school at 14 to become an "office boy". For the next 25 years he worked in business, eventually running his own employment agency for au pairs. He told his students that he had picked up the English language through reading comics as a young boy.

Bored by business, Hanfling studied 'A' levels and then enrolled on a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy by correspondence at Birkbeck College. He gained a first, then embarked on a PhD, which he completed in 1971.

Hanfling was appointed as a lecturer at the Open University in 1970, and worked there until retiring as a professor in 1993. His biggest influence was Ludwig Wittgenstein.

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