1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Rosenkranz, Johann Karl Friedrich

ROSENKRANZ, JOHANN KARL FRIEDRICH (1805-1879), German philosopher, was born at Magdeburg on the 23rd of April 1805. He read philosophy at Berlin, Halle and Heidelberg, devoting himself mainly to the doctrines of Hegel and Schleiermacher. After holding the chair of philosophy at Halle for two years, he became, in 1833, professor at the university of Königsberg, where he remained till his death on the 14th of July 1879. In his last years he was quite blind. Throughout his long professorial career, and in all his numerous publications he remained, in spite of occasional deviations on particular points, loyal to the Hegelian tradition as a whole. In the great division of the Hegelian school, he, in company with Michelet and others, formed the “centre,” midway between Erdmann and Gabler on the one hand, and the “extreme left” represented by Strauss, Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer.

Of his numerous writings, the following may be mentioned: 1. Philosophical: Kritik der Schleiermacherschen Glaubenslehre (1836); Psychologie oder Wissenschaft vom subjektiven Geist (1837; 3rd ed., 1863); Kritische Erläuterungen des Hegelschen Systems (1840); Vorlesungen über Schelling (1842); System der Wissenschaft (1850); Meine Reform der Hegelschen Philosophie (1852); Wissenschaft der logischen Idee (1858-59), with a supplement (Epilegomena, 1862); Hegels Naturphilosophie und die Bearbeitung derselben durch Vera (1868); Erläuterungen zu Hegels Encyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften (1871). Two other of his works on Hegel are important, the Leben Hegels (1844) and the Hegel als deutscher Nationalphilosoph (1870). Between 1838 and 1840 in conjunction with F. W. Schubert, he published an edition of the works of Kant, to which he appended a history of the Kantian doctrine. 2. Literary and General: Geschichte der deutschen Poesie im Mittelalter (1830); Handbuch einer allgemeinen Geschichte der Poesie (1832-33); Die Pädogogik als System (1848); Aesthetik des Hässlichen (1853); Die Poesie und ihre Geschichte (1885); Studien (1839-47) and Neue Studien (1875-78). He published also an autobiography entitled Von Magdeburg nach Königsberg (1873), which deals with his life up to the time of his settlement at Königsberg.

See Quäbicker, Karl Rosenkranz (1899), and J. Hutchison Stirling, The Secret of Hegel, part 6.