Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Friedrich Ueberweg

UEBERWEG, Friedrich (1826-1871), best known by his History of Philosophy, was born on the 22d January 1826 at Leichlingen, in Rhenish Prussia, where his father was Lutheran pastor. His mother, left early a widow, devoted her scanty means to the education of her only son. Ueberweg passed through the gymnasium at Elberfeld, and studied at the universities of Göttingen and Berlin. In 1852 he qualified himself at Bonn as privatdocent in philosophy. His System of Logic, published in 1857 (English translation 1871), and his essay On the Authenticity and the Order of the Platonic Writings, crowned by the Imperial Academy of Vienna (published 1861), contributed to draw attention to him as at once a scholar and a thinker. In 1862 he was called to Königsberg as extraordinary professor, and in 1867 he was advanced to the ordinary grade. He married in 1863, and on the 9th June 1871 he died prematurely.

The chief work of his later years was his compendious History of Philosophy, which is unmatched for fulness of information combined with conciseness, accuracy, and impartiality of treatment. The first part appeared in 1862. An English translation, in two volumes, was published in 1872, and has gone through several editions. Ueberweg translated, in 1869, Berkeley's Principles of Human Knowledge, with notes, for Kirchmann's Philosophische Bibliothek. In philosophy Ueberweg was strongly opposed to the subjectivistic tendency of the Kantian system, maintaining in particular the objectivity of space and time, which involved him in a somewhat violent controversy with several opponents. His own mode of thought he preferred to describe as an ideal realism, which refused to reduce reality to thought, but asserted a parallelism between the forms of existence and the forms of knowledge. Beneke and Schleiermacher seem to have exercised most influence upon the development of his thought. A short memoir, by his friend F. A. Lange (author of the History of Materialism), gives some account of what may be called personal opinions in philosophy and theology, which did not find expression in Ueberweg's published writings.