Skip to main content

Anthroposophy

  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Latin American Religions

Definition

Anthroposophy is understood by its members as a spiritual science founded by the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, who was an active member of the Theosophy from 1902 until 1912, when he left it and developed the anthroposophy. The anthroposophy admits and recognizes the historical events and all the discoveries of natural science, although it interprets and expands them according to its findings by a research method that considers a spiritual empiricism – perception that was provided to it by Goethe’s phenomenology.

Introduction

Rudolf Steiner was born in 1861 in Kraljevec (it is now part of Croatia), moved to Vienna at the age of 18, and lived in that region where a great social, cultural, political, philosophical, and scientific boiling was happening and that crossed through Europe. The Central European cultural scene of the second half of the nineteenth century – where Rudolf Steiner is educated and in which he also elaborates the philosophical underpinnings of...

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Institutional subscriptions

References

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Raquel Litterio de Bastos .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

About this entry

Cite this entry

de Bastos, R.L. (2015). Anthroposophy. In: Gooren, H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Latin American Religions. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08956-0_4-1

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08956-0_4-1

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-08956-0

  • eBook Packages: Springer Reference Religion and PhilosophyReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Humanities

Publish with us

Policies and ethics