Philosophia fundamentalis Friedricha Adolfa Trendelenburga

Abstract

Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg’s philosophia fundamentalis: Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg (1802-1872) is an author who connects two periods. On the one hand, he attended the lectures of one of the first followers of Immanuel Kant — Karl Leonhard Reinhold, he knew personally and was influenced by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling. On the other hand, Trendelenburg has educated a very large group of important figures within the German philosophy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (e.g., Wilhelm Dilthey, Franz Brentano and Hermann Cohen). His main work, Logische Untersuchungen (Logical investigations), was to see its release in three editions during his life. In the second edition Trendelenburg adds an introductory chapter, entitled Logik und Metaphysik als grundlegende Wissenschaft [Logic and metaphysics as a basic science]. It presents the idea of philosophy as a science and, like a lens, focuses on the most influential metaphilosophical solutions of the second half of the nineteenth century. The article in its first part presents the academic biography of Trendelenburg, while in the second it discusses the most important meta-philosophical problems raised in Logische Untersuchungen.