During the nineteenth century, German philosophy developed from a type of general knowledge to an academic discipline at the university. Changes across disciplines to the philosophy of science and psychological surveys created new challenges for the place and purpose of philosophy in the educational system. The content of logic courses for secondary schools (Gymnasiums) was centred on the dissociation of nature and the scale of logic. In this paper, I will examine a number of projects for teaching philosophy at the (...) secondary school level from new humanism to reduce philosophical to philological concerns about different projects offered by Niethammer, Hegel and Herbart. Then, I will focus on the most successful – Adolf Trendelenburg’s Elements of Aristotle’s Logic (1st edition of 1836). This work is a compilation of the logical texts of Aristotle, and for as long as sixty years, it was an official textbook in Prussian secondary schools. The aim of the paper is to show how the rethinking of Aristotle’s heritage affected the theoretical and ideological expectations of propaedeutic courses and transformed the image of logic as a philosophical discipline. (shrink)

The work of Theodor Waitz is an important but hitherto unnoticed source of Dilthey’s concept of ‘human sciences’. Waitz was an outstanding philosopher and psychologist who, in the late 1850s, devoted himself wholeheartedly to empirical anthropology. In this field Waitz distinguished himself for his defence of the unity of humankind against mainstream polygenic and racial doctrines. Waitz inspired Dilthey’s articulation of psychology into two branches: the ‘descriptive’ one and the ‘explanative’ one. Even more remarkably, in a work reviewed by Dilthey (...) in warmly favourable terms, Waitz explicitly mentioned and defined the ‘sciences which treat of the spirit ’. Some of Dilthey's most interesting ideas are thus prefigured in Waitz’s long underrated work. (shrink)