Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg

Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg ( born November 30, 1802 in Eutin, † January 24, 1872 in Berlin) was a German, especially on Kant and Aristotle oriented, philosopher, scholar and educator.

Life

Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg came from one, especially in Mecklenburg and Vorpommern widely ramified family of academics, which can be traced back to the time of the Reformation. He was a great-grandson of Protestant theologians and superintendents Theodor Trendelenburg, who in church history of Mecklenburg -Strelitz plays a central role as the progenitor of many pastors' Evil, and a grandson of Lübeck physician Karl Ludwig Friedrich Trendelenburg.

Trendelenburg was born in 1802 as the son of postal Commissioner Friedrich Wilhelm Trendelenburg and the rate Kauer pastor's daughter Susanna Katharina Schroeter born in Eutin. There he attended high school at which the Kantian Georg Ludwig King was the rector, the Trendelenburg later devoted his dissertation. He studied philology and philosophy at the universities of Kiel, Leipzig and Berlin. His philosophical teachers were Karl Leonhard Reinhold in Kiel and especially Johann Erich von Berger, whose basic idea that philosophy, the comprehensive volume of the individual sciences and the world should be regarded organistisch, Trendelenburg had a major influence. Furthermore, he heard Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann, August Detlef Christian Twesten, August Boeckh, Franz Bopp, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, August Neander, Friedrich Schleiermacher and Henrich Steffens. In 1826 he became the Dr. phil. doctorate. After that, he was a tutor at the Prussian postmaster general Karl Ferdinand Friedrich von Nagler. In 1833 he became an associate in 1837 and a full professor of philosophy and education at the University of Berlin. He was also a member of the Prussian Minister of Culture, Karl vom Stein zum Alten stone.

Trendelenburg 1836 married the daughter of his friend Karl Ferdinand Becker. He had eight children. One of his sons was the physician Friedrich Trendelenburg.

Trendelenburg was still a private tutor the writing of Aristotle On the Soul out and created as a result a much ties into Aristotelian system of logic and epistemology. He also wrote The moral idea of justice and Historical Contributions to Philosophy and took effect on the Prussian university policy, and in particular the philosophical teacher education ( Philosophicum ). Trendelenburg followed the new trend, in addition to lectures also offer regular seminars.

The so-called Trendelenburg gap in the Trendelenburg in the argument of the Transcendental Aesthetic Kant's the lack of evidence for the exclusively subjective nature of space and time criticized became known. Here About it came with Kuno Fischer to a public dispute in the Hermann Cohen intervened. Trendelenburg first to use the term Begriffsschrift for the Leibniz program of a lingua rationalis. This should make term expressions of the simplest features or terms for direct reading. Gottlob Frege took over this term in a modified form in his Begriffsschrift.

From 1849 to 1851 he was a member of the Prussian House of Representatives. Trendelenburg was also honorary doctor of law and theology. From 1847 to 1871 he was secretary of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences and in 1859 a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in Munich. Shortly before his death Trendelenburg was recorded on 24 January 1872 in the Order Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts.

To Trendelenburg's students included Friedrich Ueberweg, Eugen Dühring, Rudolf Eucken, Franz Brentano, Gustav Teichmüller, Carl von Prantl, Jürgen Bona Meyer, Friedrich Paulsen, Hermann Cohen, Hans Vaihingen, Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg von Hertling politicians. Hermann also Bonitz, who succeeded him as lecturer Council in the Prussian Ministry of Education, was of Trendelenburg and his Aristotelianism influenced, even if he believes in the doctrine of the categories explicitly critical of yourself with this. The estate is located in the Berlin State Library.

Philosophical concepts

Trendelenburg's philosophical references are characterized very differently. Typically, it is characterized as Aristotelian. He is also known as a prominent critic of Hegel. However, the intensive study of Hegel also caused that there are elements of Hegelian philosophy in Trendelenburg, such as the conception of philosophy as a whole, the only part in the individual systems, as well as the idealistic thought or idea of ​​evolution. Kant was of Trendelenburg, criticized in several respects, in particular in relation to the theory of categories. Nevertheless pervades Kant's fundamental thesis " Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind." ( CPR B 75, AA III, 75), the entire work Trendelenburg. His metaphysical ontological conception of an organic genetic world order, however, took their basic idea in important aspects of Schelling's philosophy of nature, which he had received from his teacher Erich Berger.

The relationship between philosophy and science

Against Hegel emphasized Trendelenburg that all philosophical knowledge has to take the experience to the starting point. Accordingly, each system thinking is by " Logical Investigations ", to replace the title of his major work, systematic, in which the experience is being investigated by the General is obtained from the particular. Trendelenburg opposed the construction of a system whose accuracy has to prove in practice only. As a real starting point it was rather the nature and practice of the individual sciences that are bringing in logic and metaphysics to a common denominator to unity. "The sciences happy to try their peculiar ways, but in part without detailed account of the method, since they are directed to its object and not on the process. The logic would have to observe here the task and compare the unconscious to raise the awareness and to understand what is different in the common origin. Without careful regard to the method of the individual sciences, they must miss their target, because then they have no definite object to which they rightly find in their theories. " (LU 1, IV)

Philosophy is not autonomous, but the science of sciences, which give her the material. As the special sciences must proceed methodically in order to adequately capture their material can not be deduced from the principles of philosophy. On the other hand, the individual sciences each have their own perspective, so that it is the task of philosophy to make these into a context and thus bring out the unity of thought. The logic can not be limited to the formal analysis of concepts, but must also be substantive judgments or used. " The logic has so far become a metaphysics of real science, as it has the same grasp the real principles to understand the act of thinking within their territory and thus become only the true logic. " With this view Trendelenburg has contributed significantly to development of modern science theory contributed as a philosophical discipline.

This reorientation of logic as a science customer Trendelenburg believed to have found a concept with which the philosophy that had lost heavily after the collapse of German Idealism in importance again could catch up with the rapidly developing individual sciences. "The philosophy is not likely reach the old power again until they win in hand, and she will not get more for has been discontinued, until it grows in the same way as the other sciences grow until they developed steadily, by not in any attaches new head and settles again, but history takes up the issues again and continues. " (LU 1, VIII )

Systems of philosophy

In a kind of longitudinal section Trendelenburg tried to analyze the characteristics of the various systems of the history of philosophy can be found as universally applicable criterion to distinguish them. He came to the view that all great philosophers have directly or indirectly taken a stand on the opposition of blind force and conscious thought as the original drive of world events. Accordingly, can be found at all times positions of materialistic " Demokritismus ," the idealistic " Platonism " as well as the holistic philosophy of identity ( panpsychistischen ) " Spinozism " as attitudes. Trendelenburg emphasized the diversity of variations and hybrids that are behind the three key words, but said that each system at the end of one side of the set to a close. So he looked, despite its based on intuition and common sense epistemology Locke as materialists, because this conceived human consciousness at the origin as a " tabula rasa ". Descartes, however, despite a physicalist conception of nature was for him because of his idealistic ethics as a Platonist. He left no doubt that he was the Platonic- Aristotelian tradition, which ranged up to Kant and German Idealism him the preference. "Who does something with the efficient cause of who they used, carries the purpose of wearing a higher thoughts in a similar way to how organic life subjects the efficient causes the purposes of the whole. Those glorification of forces [ materialism ] happens but on behalf of a thought that they recognize or use them. "

The basic principle of the movement

The central category in the Trendelenburg's systematic philosophy is that of the movement, in which Being and thinking are mediated by sensibility and understanding. Knowledge can only arise when an external motion is reconstructed by constructing an inner movement and brought into alignment, not in the sense of identity as an image, but as a match. One can not determine without already have an idea of ​​moving the concept of motion. The notion of the physical concept of force, which is usually used to define the movement, already includes the perception of motion. From this consideration and believes that becoming is always based on intuition and his reason therefore can not have in the purely abstract concepts of being and nothingness, Trendelenburg criticized the supposedly pure concepts of the Hegelian dialectic. " The dialectic had to prove that the self-contained thinking overtake reality. But the evidence is lacking. Because everywhere it has opened artificially to receive from the outside, what it lacks from the inside. The closed eye sees only fantasies. " (LU 1, 109) about the reality you can talk not only in pure terms, one needs the intuition. " The human mind thrives on intuition, and it dies, if it was to live by his own entrails, the starvation. " (LU 1, 109)

Everything in nature is movement. " When the forces are transformed into each other, such as the mechanical force into heat and vice versa, so the movement is in the law of conservation of energy represented by the figures of transformation Continuous. Everything that was made, any form that is there, it is the shape of the crystal or the Erdsphäroids, is produced by the action, the matter dominant movement. " ( LU1, 141) It is the calm and solid structure from motion explained by force and counterforce, but not vice versa. The outer movement corresponds to the internal movement of thought. "We call this movement in opposition to the outer space in the constructive and they first recognize in intuition. " (LU 1, 143) The ideas that arise from sense perception, are a Understand the outer movement. But even the purely abstract thinking as in the logic creates an order that has a spatial structure. It is an over-, under - or side order. "Any development of thinking translated moments one by one, through which a linking movement must pass through it. " (LU 1, 145) Each act of thought, every mental Create, Connect and discriminating is a movement in the inner space, " in which the idea stands as it were ". (LU 1, 143)

From this fundamental significance of the category of the Trendelenburg movement developed his own theory of space and time which is contrary to the usual concepts. Even space and time are for him depending on the movement, because they can not be conceived without it generating movement. " [ Is the movement composed of space and time ] In this view, space and time will be provided prior to the movement, and these ready-made elements are as it were in the movement, the two factors. But how do we take space and time as elements ready? If, further, the concept of composition of the nested -acting factors an original concept? This question shows that all three elements of the given explanation of the movement ( space, time, Factor) imply the movement itself. " (LU 1, 150)

The mathematics, geometry, as well as arithmetic is a method of abstraction, which does not have its basis in experience. Straight lines and extensionless points are not found in nature (LU 1, 274-275 ) The construction of a point is an idealized idea to fix the motion. (LU 1, 276) but the point is the basis of a straight line, and from this to construct all geometric shapes. "If we determine the three types of movement according to their importance, so the space generating movement creates the fabric of the figure, the formative counter- movement to the diversity, cohesive penetration of the unity of the whole. These three movements whose function we have distinguished, are inseparably one in the spiritual fact. " (LU 1, 280-281 )

The concept of motion is also the starting point for the derivation of the basic categories for Trendelenburg. " The basic concepts that express the necessaries structure and relationships of the movement, are therefore universally and necessarily, because they come from an act which is in all thought, and without which there is no empirical record itself. " (LU 1, 393). In the spirit of Aristotle these basic terms are in addition to the motion of the matter with the category of causality, included in the essence of matter is the form the basis of the substance and purpose in the realm of the living, as a third basic principle.

The hierarchical structure of the world

Trendelenburg looked at the world as a holistic organic system. " The system represents this great unit and is, as it only An extended sentence. Thank and His corresponds also located here., The term was alive as the substance in the action in the sentence. The reason spilled in its consequences, as the cause in its effect. The relationship of the concepts and judgments constituting the system, such as the relationship of the substances and Thätigkeiten forms the world. " (LU 2, 446 ) " The individual systems of science are themselves only members of a large system. They fused into each other by pulling from each other food. If these dependent elements merge into one organism that fulfills itself. Then the image of the great system that wants to be the spiritual counterpart of the world arises " (LU 2, 447 )

From the system presentation Trendelenburg developed a hierarchy of the world or of the scientific cognitive process, the genetically striving is based on two structural features. The Easier is the basis of the Composite. The Past is the Low compared to later generations. These features are applied to the principles of the efficient cause and purpose. The elementary mediation of thinking and being is the constructive movement of consciousness, which is linked to the unconscious causal activity of movement in space. A priori, prior to the experience in the first stage is the development of the mathematical insight that also contains the principle of necessity. The second stage is the experience that is determined by the given. " The knower is the same in real interaction with the real, and the perception that it will last sensitive in pleasure and pain, guaranteed him the reality. " (LU 2, 449 ) experiences are tied to facts. " The acquisition by the senses is done with the help of Constructive movement; the exploration goes back to mathematical laws; the matter is finally understood only by the movement. So to answer the question of how the experience of material forces ( the physics in the narrow sense ) is possible. " (LU 2, 450 ) The third stage is the area of organic nature. The dominant principle is the telos. " In the end, the designs of inventing mind, and the contemplating where it is implemented, to recognize it in the purpose which can only be understood from the prototypical end, the effect of anticipatory to cause thoughts to answer the question of how a knowledge of organic nature was possible. " (LU 2, 450)

The fourth and final step is ultimately the level of ethics. "They dominated the past and delivers them at the same time. If you wonder how a knowledge of ethics is possible, the answer lies in the fact that the ultimate purpose of human nature and human nature as a means or organ for this purpose could be detected. By now, the law enters the will, the ethical necessity, and i Ndem the will appear to the law of his being sufficient, the same necessity as freedom in the ethical necessity is the organic, the determined from the unit multiplicity, and with the organic the physical and provided the mathematical necessity. The forces which are in the organic medium, rise in ethical about people, what means and at the same time end in themselves. " (LU 2, 451) In this genetic structure of world order logic and metaphysics as the basic disciplines of philosophy have a special position. You pointed Trendelenburg to the task of exhibiting the origin and unity of the sciences.

The unconditioned is the people because of its finiteness intangible. However, man is constantly striving to exceed the limits of his cognitive ability. This is his only possible by trying to replicate the idea of ​​a divine creation in thinking. " The science is perfected only in the condition of a mind whose thought is the source of all being. What is sought in the finite, is satisfied here. The principle of knowledge and the principle of being a principle. And because the idea of God in the world lies at the foundation, the same unit is sought in things and found again as in the picture. " The act of divine knowledge is all, the substance of being. ' " (LU 2, 510) With this conception Trendelenburg turned against materialism on the side of Plato, who created the concept of the Demiurge, and on the side of Aristotle, described the idea of the divine first cause as unmoved mover.

Works (selection)

• The purpose, Paderborn 1825.
• Platonis de Ideis numeri et doctrina ex Aristotele illustrata, 1826 ( doctoral thesis )
• Elementa logices Aristoteleae, 1837 ( 9th ed 1892) ( collection of Greek passages with Latin translation )
• De Platonis Philebi consilio, Berlin, 1837.
• Logical Investigations, 1840 ( 3rd edition 1870) ( Volume 1, Volume 2 )
• Explanations of the elements of Aristotelian logic, 1842 ( 3rd edition 1876) (Google Books)
• Raphael's School of Athens, Berlin 1843.
• The logical question in Hegel's system. Two pamphlets, Leipzig 1843. ( With Friedrich Altenstein ) (Google Books)
• Historical Contributions to Philosophy, three volumes, 1846, 1855 and 1867 History of the theory of categories ( in Volume I) (Google Books)
• Over the last difference of philosophical systems ( in Volume II )
• About Spinoza's basic idea and its success, 1850 ( Volume II ) (Google Books)
• Herbart's practical philosophy and ethics of the ancients, 1856 ( in Volume III) (Google Books)