Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg

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Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg bigraphy, stories - German logician

Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg : biography

November 30, 1802 – January 24, 1872

Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg (November 30, 1802 – January 24, 1872) was a German philosopher and philologist.

Early life

He was born at Eutin, near Lübeck. He was educated at the universities of Kiel, Leipzig, and Berlin. He became more and more attracted to the study of Plato and Aristotle, and his doctoral dissertation (1826) was an attempt to reach through Aristotle’s criticisms a more accurate knowledge of the Platonic philosophy (Platonis de ideis et numeris doctrina ex Aristotele illustrata).

He declined the offer of a classical chair at Kiel, and accepted a post as tutor to the son of an intimate friend of Karl vom Stein zum Altenstein, the Prussian minister of education. He held this position for seven years (1826–1833), occupying his leisure time with the preparation of a critical edition of Aristotle’s De anima (1833; 2nd ed. by Christian Belger, 1877). In 1833 Altenstein appointed Trendelenburg extraordinary professor in Berlin, and four years later he was advanced to an ordinary professorship.

Works

Trendelenburg was also the author of the following:

  • Elementa Logices Aristotelicae (1836; 9th ed., 1892; Eng. trans., 1881), a selection of passages from the Organon with Latin translation and notes, containing the substance of Aristotle’s logical doctrine, supplemented by Erlauterungen zu den Elementen der Aristotelischen Logik (1842; 3rd ed. 1876).
  • Logische Untersuchungen (1840; 3rd ed. 1870), and Die logische Frage in Hegels System (1843), important factors in the reaction against Hegel.
  • Historische Beitrage zur Philosophie (1846–1867), in three volumes, the first of which (Geschichte der Kategorienlehre) contains a history of the doctrine of the Categories.
  • Geschichte der Kategorienlehre I: Aristotle Kategorienlehre; II: Die Kategorienlehre in der Geschichte der Philosophie, (1845, reprint: Hildesheim, Olms, 1979).
  • Des Naturrecht aufdem Grunde der Ethik (1860).
  • Lücken im Völkerrecht (1870), a treatise on the defects of international law, occasioned by the war of 1870.
  • Kleine Schriften (1871), papers dealing with non-philosophical, chiefly national and educational subjects.

Notes

As philosopher

Trendelenburg’s philosophizing is conditioned throughout by his loving study of Plato and Aristotle, whom he regards not as opponents but as building jointly on the broad basis of idealism. His own standpoint may be called a modern version of Aristotelianism. While denying the possibility of an absolute method and an absolute philosophy, as contended for by Hegel and others, Trendelenburg was emphatically an idealist in the ancient or Platonic sense; his whole work was devoted to the demonstration of the ideal in the real. But he maintained that the procedure of philosophy must be analytic, rising from the particular facts to the universal in which we find them explained. We divine the system of the whole from the part we know, but the process of reconstruction must remain approximative. Our position forbids the possibility of a final system. Instead, therefore, of constantly beginning afresh in speculation, it should be our duty to attach ourselves to what may be considered the permanent results of historic developments.

The classical expression of these results Trendelenburg finds mainly in the Platonico-Aristotelian system. The philosophical question is stated thus: How are thought and being united in knowledge? How does thought get at being? And how does being enter into thought? Proceeding on the principle that like can only be known by like, Trendelenburg next reaches a doctrine peculiar to himself (though based upon Aristotle) that plays a central part in his speculations. Motion is the fundamental fact common to being and thought; the actual motion of the external world has its counterpart in the constructive motion involved in every instance of perception or thought. From motion he proceeds to deduce time, space and the categories of mechanics and natural science. These, being thus derived, are at once subjective and objective in their scope. It is true that matter can never be completely resolved into motion, but the irreducible remainder may be treated, like Aristotle, as an abstraction we asymptotically approach but never reach.