Zurück zu Aristoteles: Trendelenburg and the Aristoteles-Renaissance in 19th century Germany

One of the conditions of the 19th century German Aristoteles-Rainessance is to be found in the complete edition of the Corpus aristotelicum, usually known as Bekker edition, given by the Berlin Academy of Sciences. Undisputed protagonist of such a Rainessance is surely Adolf Trendelenburg, philologer and philosopher, engaged in the well-know debate about the Aristotelian doctrine of categories. As opposed to Kant and Hegel, Trendelenburg essentially aimed at demonstrating that the Aristotelian categories were anything but a rhapsody. The strategy developed in his 1846 Aristoteles Kategorienlehre was to attest the systematic nature of Aristotle’s thought, by deducing the categories order on the basis of the relationship that organise the constituent parts of the grammatical proposition. It was thus to be shown the ontological nature of the categories, with a view to restoring a strong connexion between logic and metaphysics. Here lie the main lines of Trendelenburg’s philosophical project that we would try to reconstitute in order to counter a too often repeated, and basically negative, interpretation: the grammatical guideline would be used to the detriment of the ontological nature of the categories. We would say that the converse is true: for Trendelenburg it is rather a question of understanding that it is only through language that the categories can be properly appreciated as regards their ontological aspect. And that includes reconsidering grammar in the light of a quite new philosophical scope.