Date of Birth: 
Place of Birth: Bergen, Hordaland, Norway
About Harald Ofstad
- Harald Frithjof Seiersted Ofstad (13 October 1920 – 5 October 1994) was a Norwegian moral philosopher.
- He was Professor in Applied Philosophy at Stockholm University for more than 30 years. Born in Bergen, the youngest son of a high-ranking police officer, Ofstad passed the examen artium in 1939 and completed a degree in law in 1945 before changing to philosophy, which he studied under Arne Næss; he was part of the "Bergen group" and one of the most prominent exponents of Næss' "empirical semantics" approach.
- He became a cand.
- mag.
- in philosophy in 1946, studied in the United States at Yale University and other institutions as a Rockefeller Fellow in 1947–49, and was a University Fellow at the University of Oslo in 1949–54.
- He was appointed to a professorship in philosophy at the University of Bergen in 1954, but after only one year took a position as professor of applied philosophy at Stockholm University, where he remained until his retirement in 1987.
- He then returned to Bergen.
- He died in Oslo in 1994. He married Erna Magnussen, a historian of literature, in 1945, and published a collection of essays with her in 1961.Ofstad's interest in philosophy arose out of his encounter with Nazism during World War II, when Norway was occupied by Nazi Germany.
- He interpreted Nazism as a manifestation of the human tendency to feel contempt for weakness, a viewpoint which he developed in his 1971 book VÃ¥r forakt for svakhet (Our Contempt for Weakness).
- Like many of his generation, influenced by American social scientists and such thinkers as Theodor W.
- Adorno, he sought the origins of authoritarianism and nationalism.
- He was one of the most cited Norwegian moral philosophers and participated actively in the public debate in both Norway and Sweden; in 1978 he forcefully disagreed with Thorkild Hansen over the latter's book Processen mod Hamsun in a debate televised on NRK.
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