Teichmüller, Gustav

Born Nov. 19, 1832, in Braunschweig; died May 22, 1888, in Dorpat (now Tartu). Philosopher of the idealist school.

A pupil of F. A. Trendelenburg, Teichmüller was a professor in Göttingen in 1867, in Basel in 1868, and in Dorpat (Tartu) from 1871. His philosophical views were shaped by G. W. von Leibniz by way of the latter’s influence on R. H. Lotze and J. F. Herbart. Teichmüller’s doctrines as a whole constitute a distinctive variant of Christian personalism, in opposition to both positivism and evolutionism on the one hand and to traditional Platonism on the other. According to Teichmüller, the essence of being is the individual “essential self,” which reveals itself in self-consciousness but can also act unconsciously. Holding to an idealistically teleological position, Teichmüller rejected Darwinism for allegedly treating chance and continuity as absolutes. Much of Teichmüller’s work is devoted to the history of philosophical concepts. Among those influenced by him were F. Nietzsche and the Russians A. A. Kozlov and E. A. Bobrov.