Christoph von Sigwart

Christoph von Sigwart

Christoph von Sigwart (28 March 1830 - 4 August 1904), son of the philosopher Heinrich Christoph Wilhelm Sigwart, was a German logician.

After a course of philosophy and theology, he became professor at Blaubeuren (1859), and eventually at Tübingen, in 1865. His principal work, Logik, published in 1873, took an important place among contributions to logical theory in the late nineteenth century. In the preface to the first edition, Sigwart explains that he makes no attempt to appreciate the logical theories of his predecessors; he intended to construct a theory of logic, complete in itself.

It represents the results of a long and careful study not only of German but also of English logicians. In 1895 an English translation by Miss H Dendy was published in London. Chapter v. of the second volume is especially interesting to English thinkers as containing a profound examination of the Induction theories of Bacon, JS Mill and Hume.

Among his other works are Spinozas neu entdeckter Traktat von Gott, dem Menschen und dessen Gluckscligkeit (1866); Kleine Schriften (1881); Vorfragen der Ethik (1886). The Kleine Schriften contains valuable criticisms on Paracelsus and Bruno.

Quotation:

"No amount of failure in the attempt to subject the world of sensible experience to a thorough-going system of conceptions, and to bring all happenings back to cases of immutably valid law, is able to shake our faith in the rightness of our principles. We hold fast to our demand that even the greatest apparent confusion must sooner or later solve itself in transparent formulas."

References

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)