 Nicolai Hartmann (b. Riga, 1882, d. Göttingen, 1950) was recognized in the first half of the twentieth century as one of the leading German philosophers, on a par with Husserl, Jaspers, or Heidegger. Born in Riga, in what was then called the Livonia Governorate, a German-speaking part of the Russian Empire (now Latvia), Hartmann was Baltic German, spoke German at home and Russian at school, and at age fifteen went to a German boarding school in St. Petersburg. His engineer father died suddenly when Hartmann was eight years old, but left him with a predilection for both music and astronomy, hobbies that would remain with him throughout his life. After gymnasium in St. Petersburg, he studied medicine for two years in Dorpat (Tartu, Estonia), decided that a more comprehensive course of study would be more satisfying, and switched to studying philosophy and classical philology, again in St. Petersburg. Revolutionary uprisings there led to the closing of the university in 1905. As a Baltic German, he did not see himself directly involved in Russian affairs, and, unwilling to interrupt his studies, he transferred from cosmopolitan St. Petersburg to the landlocked town of Marburg, Germany, to study philosophy with Hermann Cohen (1842–1919) and Paul Natorp (1854–1924), the leaders of what was later to be called the “Marburg School” of Neo-Kantianism.