Max Ferdinand Scheler (; 22 August 1874 – 19 May 1928) was a German philosopher known for his work in phenomenology, ethics, and philosophical anthropology. Considered in his lifetime one of the most prominent German philosophers, Scheler developed the philosophical method of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. Given that school's utopian ambitions of re-founding all of human knowledge, Scheler was nicknamed the "Adam of the philosophical paradise" by José Ortega y Gasset. After Scheler's death in 1928, Martin Heidegger affirmed, with Ortega y Gasset, that all philosophers of the century were indebted to Scheler and praised him as "the strongest philosophical force in modern Germany, nay, in contemporary Europe and in contemporary philosophy as such." Scheler was an important influence on the theology of Pope John Paul II, who wrote his 1954 doctoral thesis on "An Evaluation of the Possibility of Constructing a Christian Ethics on the Basis of the System of Max Scheler", and later wrote many articles on Scheler's philosophy. Thanks to John Paul II as well as to Scheler's influence on his student Edith Stein, Scheler has exercised a notable influence on Catholic thought to this day. Life and career Childhood Max Scheler was born in Munich, Germany, on 22 August 1874, to a well-respected orthodox Jewish family. He had "a rather typical late nineteenth century upbringing in a Jewish household bent on assimilation and agnosticism." As an adolescent he turned to Catholicism, and Catholic thinkers such as St. Augustine and Pascal would significantly influence his philosophical positions. Student years Scheler began his university studies as a medical student at the University of Munich; he then transferred to the University of Berlin where he abandoned medicine in favor of philosophy and sociology, studying under Wilhelm Dilthey, Carl Stumpf and Georg Simmel. He moved to the University of Jena in 1896 where he studied under Rudolf Eucken, at that time a very popular philosopher who went on to win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1908. (Eucken corresponded with William James, a noted proponent of philosophical pragmatism, and throughout his life, Scheler entertained a strong interest in pragmatism.) It was at Jena that Scheler completed his doctorate and his habilitation and began his professional life as a teacher. His doctoral thesis, completed in 1897, was entitled Beiträge zur Feststellung der Beziehungen zwischen den logischen und ethischen Prinzipien (Contribution to establishing the relationships between logical and ethical principles).