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Jakob Friedrich von Reiff ( 23 December 1810 in Vaihingen an der Enz; † 6 July 1879 in Tübingen) he was a  deutscher Philosoph.

Life
Reiff visited 1828-33 the Protestant Tübingen pin and studied Theology (inter alia, the head of the Tübingen school, Ferdinand Christian Baur) and Philosophy. Like David Friedrich Strauss before him, he began his philosophical lectures as a repetitioner at the Tübinger Stift and continued this since 1840 as a Privatdozent at the University of Tübingen. In Tübingen in 1844 he was appointed associate professor, in 1855 full professor. 1863 to 1864 he served as rector of the University of Tübingen; the retirement took place in 1877. His grave is located on the town cemetery Tübingen.

Jakob Friedrich Reiff is the father of the mathematician and physicist Richard Reiff as well as the two-time father-in-law of the Lindau doctor and honorary citizen Dr. Ing. Karl Bever.

Philosophy
Reiff first went out of Hegel's then dominant philosophy, but soon came across a critique of Hegel's absolute Idealism to his own philosophical standpoint.

On the Hegelian system, on the one hand, he criticized the logicism with which no genuinely practical philosophy could be combined, and on the other, the absolute viewpoint that disregarded the limits of the finite self. He approached the transcendental critical point of view of the science of science, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and again gave primacy to practical reason about the theoretical and will-determinations of the logical categories.

At the same time Reiff saw in Hegel's system a dualism, which he diagnosed as the cause of the disintegration of the Hegelschule in left and right-wing hedonism. Thus Reiff took it upon himself as his task to reconcile with this dualism both decay tendencies in a final synthesis (the last to which German idealism came).

This synthesis was undertaken by Reiff in the above-mentioned ethical-critical point of view, which he combined with Hegel's logical achievements, in his main work, the 'System of Determining Will' (1842).

Reiff's students include Hans Vaihinger (Philosophy of the As), Christoph von Sigwart (Logic), Albert Schwegler, Karl Christian Planck ('The Ages'), Ludwig Noack (1846-48 publisher of the 'speculative yearbooks'), Karl Theodor Bayrhoffer, Julius Bahnsen and the Finnish 'national philosopher' Johan Vilhelm Snellman. In contemporary judgments, the importance of Reiff's philosophy was valued highly; Planck, for example, describes it as a "second Kantian critique in higher authority" ; according to Heinrich Schwarz, it "occurred like the reign of Titanic forces and proclaimed the dawn of a new epoch of spiritual life." However, during the March Revolution of 1848, which extinguished public interest in idealism, it prevented a broader effect of Reiff's philosophy. His two-volume 'New System of Philosophy' (1850) withdrew Reiff from the publication; it is considered lost. Since the early and late phases of German Idealism have increasingly come to the center of attention, Reiff's philosophy is also receiving more attention

Nobilitierung
1874 he was awarded the Knight's Cross 1st class of the Order of the Württemberg Crown, which was associated with the personal nobility title.

Works (selection)

 * Über das Verhältnis von Philosophie und Religion, mit der Beurtheilung der hauptsächlichsten gegenwärtigen Formen desselben (1839)


 * On the Relationship of Philosophy and Religion, with the Judgment of the Principal Present Forms of the Same (1839)


 * The beginning of philosophy, with a foundation of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences (Stuttgart 1840)


 * The system of volitional determination (Tübingen 1842)


 * About some important points in philosophy (Tübingen 1843)


 * On the Principle of Philosophy and the Idea of the System of Determining Will (1846)


 * About Spinozism in Kantian Philosophy (1856)


 * On the Hegelian dialectic (Tübingen 1866)

Literature



 * Ludwig Feuerbach: Some Remarks on the 'Beginning of Philosophy' by J. F. Reiff.  In: Works in Six Volumes, ed. by Erich Thies, Vol. 3: Critiques and Treatises II (1839-1843), Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975, pp. 130-140.

Weblinks

 * About the Hegelian dialectic in: Archive German-language philosophical texts