Gottlob Ernst Schulze

Gottlob Ernst Schulze (23 August 1761 – 14 January 1833) was a German philosopher, born in Heldrungen (modern-day Thuringia, Germany).

Biography

Schulze was a professor at Wittenberg, Helmstedt, and Göttingen.^[1] His most influential book was Aenesidemus (1792), a skeptical polemic against Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Karl Leonhard Reinhold's Philosophy of the Elements.

In Göttingen, he advised his student Arthur Schopenhauer to concentrate on the philosophies of Plato and Kant. This advice had a strong influence on Schopenhauer's philosophy. In the winter semester of 1810 and 1811, Schopenhauer studied both psychology and metaphysics under Schulze.^[2]

Schulze died in Göttingen.

Quotes

• "As determined by the Critique of Pure Reason, the function of the principle of causality thus undercuts all philosophizing about the where or how of the origin of our cognitions. All assertions on the matter, and every conclusion drawn from them, become empty subtleties, for once we accept that determination of the principle as our rule of thought, we could never ask, "Does anything actually exist which is the ground and cause of our representations?". We can only ask, "How must the understanding join these representations together, in keeping with the pre-determined functions of its activity, in order to gather them as one experience?"^[3]

References