Paul Hensel

Who was Paul Hensel?

Paul Hugo Hensel was a German philosopher, son of the landowner and entrepreneur Sebastian Hensel, brother of the mathematician Kurt Hensel, grandson of the composer Fanny Mendelssohn and the painter Wilhelm Hensel, and a descendant of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn.

Hensel was born in Groß-Barten near Königsberg, Prussia and became a professor of philosophy at Heidelberg and Erlangen, where he taught until 1928. At Erlangen, Hensel was the supervisor of Hans Reichenbach's dissertation on the theory of probability.