Wilhelm Traugott Krug (22 June 1770 – 12 January 1842) was a German philosopher and writer.
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He was born at Radis in Saxony, and died at Leipzig. He studied at Wittenberg under Reinhard and Jehnichen, at Jena under Reinhold, and at Göttingen.
From 1801 to 1804 he was professor of philosophy at Frankfurt (Oder), after which he succeeded Kant in the chair of logic and metaphysics at the university of Königsberg. From 1809 till his death he was professor of philosophy at Leipzig.
In philosophy his method was psychological; he attempted to explain the Ego by examining the nature of its reflection upon the facts of consciousness. Being is known to us only through its presentation in consciousness; consciousness only in its relation to Being. Both Being and Consciousness, however, are immediately known to us, as also the relation existing between them. By this Transcendental Synthesis he proposed to reconcile Realism and Idealism, and to destroy the traditional difficulty between transcendental, or pure, thought and things in themselves.
Krug challenged Hegel to deduce his quill or pen from German Idealism's Philosophy of Nature. In so doing, he challenged the thinking that particular, perceptually real things could be logically known from general concepts. As such, this was also a rejection of the Ontological Proof of God's existence and also Hegel's Absolute idealism, with its Absolute Spirit. Both claimed that something exists, or has being, because it is a thought in someone's mind.
He was a prolific writer on a great variety of subjects; he excelled as a popularizer rather than as an original thinker. His work stimulated freedom of thought in religion and politics. Beitrage zur Geschichte der Philos. des XIX. Jahrh. (1835-1837) contained criticisms of Hegel and Schelling.