Eduard Zeller - Thought

Thought

Nonetheless his merits as an original thinker are far outshone by his splendid services to the history of philosophy. Zeller's conception of the history of Greek thought was influenced by the dialectical philosophy of Hegel. Some critics maintain that Zeller was not alive enough to the so-called intimate relation which thought holds to national life and to the idiosyncrasy of the thinker. It is held in some circles that he lays too much stress upon the "concept," and explains too much by the Hegelian antithesis of subjective and objective despite the fact that his history of Greek philosophy is a noble monument of solid learning informed with natural sagacity. He received the highest recognition, not only from philosophers and learned societies all over the world, but also from the emperor and the German people. In 1894 the Emperor Wilhelm II made him a "Wirklicher Geheimrat" with the title of "Excellenz," and his bust, with that of Helmholtz, was set up at the Brandenburg Gate near the statues erected to the Emperor and Empress Frederick.

The Philosophie der Griechen has been translated into English by S. F. Alleyne (2 vols, 1881) in sections: S. F. Alleyne, History of Greek Philosophy to the time of Socrates (1881); O. J. Reichel, Socrates and the Socratic Schools (1868; 2nd ed. 1877); S. F. Alleyne and A. Goodwin, Plato and the Older Academy (1876); Benjamin Francis Conn Costelloe and J. H. Muirhead, Aristotle and the Earlier Peripatetics (1897); O. J. Reichel, Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics (1870 and 1880); S. F. Alleyne, History of Eclecticism in Greek Philosophy (1883).

Zeller was also, in Philosophie der Griechen, one of the first to use the term "übermensch", later reified by Nietzsche, in adjectival form: "...so kann die Glückseligkeit, welche in ihr besteht, auch als eine übermenschliche, die Glückseligkeit der ethischen Tugend dagegen als das eigenthümlich menschliche Gut bezeichnet werden."