Eduard Zeller - Life

Life

Eduard Zeller was born at Kleinbottwar in Württemberg, and educated at the University of Tübingen and under the influence of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. In 1840 he was Privatdozent of theology at Tübingen, in 1847 professor of theology at Berne, in 1849 professor of theology at Marburg, migrating soon afterwards to the faculty of philosophy as the result of disputes with the Clerical party. He became professor of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg in 1862, moved to Berlin in 1872, and retired around 1895. His great work is his Die Philosophie der Griechen in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung (The Philosophy of Greeks in their Historical Development) (1844-52). This book he continued to amplify and improve in the light of further research; the last edition appeared in 1902. It was translated into most of the European languages and became the recognized text-book on Greek philosophy.

Zeller was also very active on theology, and published three volumes of philosophical essays. He was also one of the founders of the Theologische Jahrbücher, a periodical which acquired great importance as the exponent of the historical method of David Strauss and Christian Baur. Like most of his contemporaries he began with Hegelianism, but subsequently he developed a system on his own lines. He saw the necessity of going back to Kant in the sense of demanding a critical reconsideration of the epistemological problems which Kant had made but a partially successful attempt to solve.