Fred K. Schaefer

Fred K. Schaefer (Berlin, 7 July 1904 - USA, 6 June 1953) was a geographer. He is considered as one of the pioneers of quantitative revolution.

Life

Fred K. Schaefer was born in Berlin, Germany in the family of metal worker [Bunge, William, (1979): Fred K. Schaefer and the Science of Geography; Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 69, No. 1, Special Issue: Seventy-Five Years of American Geography (Mar., 1979), pp. 128-132] . He was involved in politics as a member of Social Democratic party and after the rise of fascism he fled from Nazi Germany.

Later in the United States he became an inaugural member of the Department of Geography at Iowa.

He died of a heart attack on June 6, 1953.

Works

He is well-known for his article in flagship American periodical, Annals, Association of American Geographers called "Exceptionalism in geography: A Methodological Examination" [Schaefer, F.K. (1953): Exceptionalism in Geography: A Methodological Examination, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 43, pp. 226-245.] It was both a repudiation of Richard Hartshorne's position in United States, and a call for a scientific approach to geography based upon the search for geographical laws (the ultimate form of a scientific generalization). Schaefer died before his article even appeared in print, and so he was never able to elaborate his argument, nor defend himself from Hartshorne's subsequent attack. But the article became a rallying point for the younger generation of economic geographers who were intent on reinventing the discipline as a science, or "spatial science" as it was later dubbed (Economic geography should move away from regionalism and become more scientific).

References