Fritz-Joachim von Rintelen, the German philosopher of value, was born in Stettin. He received a doctorate in philosophy in 1924 from the University of Munich, where he began to lecture in 1928. Von Rintelen was appointed professor at the University of Bonn in 1933 and at Munich in 1936, but he was suspended on political grounds in 1941. In 1947 von Rintelen became professor of philosophy, psychology, and pedagogy at the University of Mainz. He was a visiting professor at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina, from 1951 to 1952 and at the University of Southern California in 1957.

Von Rintelen gave both a systematic and a detailed historical interpretation of the problem of value. Prior to his dismissal from his professorship at Munich, he had explicated in detail a theory of value (Wert) and of meaning (Sinn) and had built a philosophical anthropology upon it. After World War II...