Simmel Georg (1858–1918), German philosopher and one of the founders of sociology as a distinct discipline. Born and educated in Berlin, he was a popular lecturer at its university. But the unorthodoxy of his interests and unprofessional writing style probably kept him from being offered a regular professorship until 1914, and then only at the provincial university of Strasbourg. He died four years later. His writings ranged from conventional philosophical topics – with books on ethics, philosophy of history, education, religion, and the philosophers Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche – to books on Rembrandt, Goethe, and the philosophy of money. He wrote numerous essays on various artists and poets, on different cities, and on such themes as love, adventure, shame, and on being a stranger, as well as on many specifically sociological topics. Simmel was regarded as a Kulturphilosoph who meditated on his themes in an insightful and digressive rather than scholarly and systematic style. Though late in life he sketched a unifying Lebensphilosophie (philosophy of life) that considers all works and structures of culture as products of different forms of human experience, Simmel has remained of interest primarily for a multiplicity of insights into specific topics. R.H.W.