Adolf Trendelenburg

“Wo es noch keine anderen Wissenschaften giebt, da giebt es auch eigentlich noch keine Philosophie.”

• There’s no direct connection between Niels Bohr and the Prussian philosopher Adolf Trendelenburg (1802-1872). We claim, nonetheless, that Trendelenburg was instrumental in laying the philosophical groundwork for Bohr’s point of view.
• Born in 1802 in Eutin, Duchy of Oldenburg, Holy Roman Empire. Eutin became a part of Prussia in 1867, and eventually part of Schleswig-Holstein.
• In some senses, Trendelenburg is a direct counterpart of Rasmus Nielsen. Both saw the task of philosophy as coming after the facts of the (empirical) sciences.
• Trendelenburg had direct impact on Kierkegaard (clearly acknowledged in the latter’s journals and in the Postscript).
• Adolf Trendelenburg’s son, Friederich, became a distinguished surgeon and physiologist. Several procedures are named after him.

Influence on Kierkegaard

Primary sources

• Elementa logices Aristotelicae. In usum scholarum ex Aristotele excerpsit convertit, illustravit Frider. 1836. \(\to\) Outlines of logic; an English translation of Trendelenburg’s Elementa logices Aristoteleae
• Logische Untersuchungen. 1840.
  
• Die logische Frage in Hegel’s System: Zwei Streitschriften. 1843.

Secondary sources

• Frederick Beiser, Late German Idealism: Trendelenburg and Lotze. 2013.
• Come, Arnold B. (1991). Trendelenburg’s Influence on Kierkegaard’s Modal Categories.
• Giovanelli, Marco. Reality and negation-Kant’s principle of anticipations of perception: an investigation of its impact on the post-Kantian debate. 2010.
• Eliot Michaelson and Mark Textor. “Tolerating sense variation” Australasian Journal of Philosophy. 2023. https://doi.org/10.1080/00048402.2021.1951311
• Josef Schmidt. Hegels Wissenschaft der Logik und ihre Kritik durch Adolf Trendelenburg. 1977.
• Risto Vilkko. “The logic question during the first half of the nineteenth century” in The Development of Modern Logic, ed. Leila Haaparanta.