Otto Friedrich Bollnow (1903–91) gained a doctorate in physics with Max Born before studying philosophy with (especially) Georg Misch and Martin Heidegger, finishing his ‘Habilitation’ at Göttingen in 1931. In the years that followed, he found it difficult to gain a permanent teaching position, achieving this only in 1938. During the war, Bollnow served in the German army. In 1946 he began to teach at the University of Mainz, and in 1953 started as a professor of philosophy and pedagogy at the University of Tübingen, where he stayed for the rest of his life.

As a writer he was prolific: his bibliography runs to 38 books and about 300 articles, almost none of which have been translated into English. Bollnow’s work towards an anthropological pedagogy can be placed within and between the fields of existentialism and phenomenology. His book of 1963, Human space, is situated there too. For more about him, see here.