Christoph von Sigwart

Christoph von Sigwart

Christoph von Sigwart
Born 28 March 1830
Tübingen, Württemberg
Died 4 August 1904 (aged 74)
Tübingen, Württemberg
Era 19th-century philosophy
Region Western Philosophy
School Psychologism
Main interests
Logic, ethics

Christoph von Sigwart (28 March 1830 – 4 August 1904) was a German philosopher and logician. He was the son of philosopher Heinrich Christoph Wilhelm Sigwart (August 31, 1789 - November 16, 1844).

Life

After a course of philosophy and theology, he became professor at Blaubeuren (1859), and eventually at Tübingen, in 1865. The first volume of his principal work, Logik, was published in 1873 and took an important place among contributions to logical theory in the late nineteenth century. In the preface to the first edition, Sigwart explains that he makes no attempt to appreciate the logical theories of his predecessors; he intended to construct a theory of logic, complete in itself.

The Logik represents the results of a long and careful study not only of German but also of English logicians. In 1895 an English translation by Helen Dendy was published in London. Chapter 5 of the second volume is especially interesting to English thinkers as it contains a profound examination of the Induction theories of Francis Bacon, John Stuart Mill and David Hume. His Kleine Schriften contains valuable criticisms on Paracelsus and Giordano Bruno.

Quotation:

No amount of failure in the attempt to subject the world of sensible experience to a thorough-going system of conceptions, and to bring all happenings back to cases of immutably valid law, is able to shake our faith in the rightness of our principles. We hold fast to our demand that even the greatest apparent confusion must sooner or later solve itself in transparent formulas.[1]

Works

Works in English

Notes

  1. James, William. The Will to Believe. Reprint. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1911. 120.

References

External links