Individuals with outstanding academic and research achievements may be awarded an honorary doctorate. Here is a list of honorary doctors of the University of Konstanz and some word about their careers.
Faculty of Humanities
Department of Philosophy
- Prof. em. Dr Dr h.c. Wolfgang Spohn (1950) is a philosopher. In 2012, Wolfgang Spohn was the first scientist outside the English-speaking world to be honoured with the Lakatos Prize, the most prestigious international prize for the philosophy of science, for his comprehensive conception of rank theory.
- Professor Dr. Dr. h.c. Adolf Grünbaum (1923) is a German philosopher. He emigrated to the United States shortly before the Second World War ended. There he studied mathematics, physics and philosophy. He has been a philosophy professor at the University of Pittsburgh since 1960. It was there that he founded the Center for Philosophy of Science.
- Professor Dr Dr h.c. Gustav Hempel (1905-1997) was a German philosopher. He collaborated with Paul Oppenheim to develop the Hempel-Oppenheim-Scheme, also known as the deductive-nomological model. It creates a formal structure for scientifically explaining causality using natural language. Hempel lectured around the world.
- Professor Dr Dr h.c. mult. Hans Jonas (1903-1993) was a German philosopher and author. As a professor, he taught in New York, among other places.
- Professor Dr Dr h.c. mult. Ernst Mayr (1904-2005) was a biologist and the main proponent of modern synthetic evolutionary theory. Mayr worked in New York, taught at Harvard and is regarded as one of the most influential natural science researchers of the 20th century.
- Professor Dr Dr h.c. Nicholas Rescher (1928) is currently one of the most internationally renowned and accomplished contemporary philosophers in the United States.
- Dr Dr h.c. Martin Walser (1927) is a writer and is considered to be one of the most significant story tellers and playwrights in the post-war era. Walser has taken and continues to take a stand on political and societal controversies in Germany.
Department of History and Sociology
- Professor Dr Jan Assmann (1938) is a German scholar in the fields of Egyptian, religious and cultural studies. He taught at Heidelberg University.
- Profesor Dr Dr h.c. Jan Philipp Reemtsma (1952) is a German scholar of German studies, an essayist, a political journalist and a patron of the arts. He also taught at the Universität Hamburg. The broad spectrum of his prolific work ranges from literary studies to sociological analysis of violence.
- Professor Dr Dr h.c. Wolfgang Reinhard (1937) is a German historian who taught at the University of Freiburg.
Department of Literature
- Professor David Wellbery (1947) is professor of German literature at the University of Chicago. Wellbery is an internationally acclaimed literary scholar.
- Professor Geoffrey Hartmann (1929-2016) was a literary theorist. He taught English and comparative literature at Yale.
- Professor Andrei Corbea-Hoisie (1951) is a Romanian scholar of German studies and Romance languages and a university lecturer. He has been a professor of German literature at the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iassy in Romania since 1995.
- Professor Eduard Goldstücker (1913-2000) was a Czech literary historian and publicist, who worked in Prague and Sussex. He also worked for the Czech diplomatic service.
Department of Linguistics
- Professor Dr. John J. Gumperz (1922-2013) was an American linguist and taught at the University of California at Berkeley.
- Professor Dr. Paul Kiparsky (1941) is a professor of linguistics at Stanford University.