Max Picard (5 June 1888 in Schopfheim, Baden, Germany – 3 October 1965 in Sorengo, Switzerland) was a Swiss writer and philosopher, important as one of the few thinkers writing from a deeply Platonic sensibility in the 20th century.
Born to a Jewish family in Schopfheim, a German village on the Swiss border, Max Picard studied medicine and received his medical degree in 1911.
Unsatisfied with the positivist and Darwinian orientations of the medical profession at the time, he began as of 1915 to distance himself from it to turn more towards philosophy.
[2] He first met the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel in 1947, and developed a friendship and steady correspondence throughout their lives (published in 2006[3]).
Marcel provided the foreword to the first French translation of Picard's Die Welt des Schweigens (The World of Silence) in 1953.