Rudolf Steiner (born 25 February 1861 in Murakirály, Austria-Hungary (now Donji Kraljevec, Croatia), died 30 March 1925 in Dornach, Switzerland) was an Austrian philosopher, literary scholar, educator, artist, playwright, social thinker, and esotericist.[1][2][3] He was the founder of Anthroposophy, Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, anthroposophical medicine,[4] and the new artistic form of Eurythmy.

He characterized anthroposophy as follows:
“ Anthroposophy is a path of knowledge, to guide the spiritual in the human being to the spiritual in the universe…. Anthroposophists are those who experience, as an essential need of life, certain questions on the nature of the human being and the universe, just as one experiences hunger and thirst.[5] ”

Steiner advocated a form of ethical individualism, to which he later brought a more explicitly spiritual component. He derived his epistemology from Johann Wolfgang Goethe's world view, where “Thinking… is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas.”

Childhood and education

Steiner's father, Johann, had left his position as huntsman in the service of Count Hoyos in Geras to marry (the Count had refused his permission). He became a telegraph operator on the Southern Austrian Railway, at the time of Rudolf's birth stationed in Murakirály in the Muraköz region, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (present-day Donji Kraljevec, Međimurje region, northernmost Croatia). Steiner's mother's maternal name was Franziska Blie. In the first two years of his life the family moved twice, first to Mödling, near Vienna, and then, through the promotion of his father to stationmaster, to Pottschach, located in the foothills of the eastern Austrian Alps in present-day Burgenland.[4]