Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg (30 November 1802 – 24 January 1872) was a German philosopher and philologist. Life He was born at Eutin, near Lübeck. He was placed in a gymnasium in Eutin, which was under the direction of , a philologist influenced by Immanuel Kant. He was educated at the universities of Kiel, Leipzig, Berlin. He became more and more attracted to the study of Plato and Aristotle, and his 1826 doctoral dissertation, Platonis de ideis et numeris doctrina ex Aristotele illustrata (On Plato's Doctrine of Ideas and Numbers as Illustrated by Aristotle), was an attempt to reach through Aristotle's criticisms a more accurate knowledge of the Platonic philosophy. He declined the offer of a classical chair at Kiel, and accepted a post as tutor to the son of an intimate friend of Karl vom Stein zum Altenstein, the Prussian minister of education. He held this position for seven years (1826–1833), occupying his leisure time with the preparation of a critical edition of Aristotle's De anima (1833; 2nd ed. by Christian Belger, 1877). In 1833 Altenstein appointed Trendelenburg extraordinary professor in Berlin, and four years later he was advanced to an ordinary professorship. Teaching For nearly 40 years, he proved himself markedly successful as a teacher, during the greater part of which time he had to examine in philosophy and pedagogics all candidates for the scholastic profession in Prussia. His teaching method was highly regarded by Søren Kierkegaard who called him "one of the most sober philosophical philologists I know." He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1861. Two of his prominent students were Franz Brentano and Wilhelm Dilthey. Philosophical work Defense of teleology Trendelenburg's philosophizing is conditioned throughout by his loving study of Plato and Aristotle, whom he regards not as opponents but as building jointly on the broad basis of idealism. His own standpoint may be called a modern version of Aristotelianism. While denying the possibility of an absolute method and an absolute philosophy, as contended for by Hegel and others, Trendelenburg was emphatically an idealist in the ancient or Platonic sense; his whole work was devoted to the demonstration of the ideal in the real. But he maintained that the procedure of philosophy must be analytic, rising from the particular facts to the universal in which we find them explained. We divine the system of the whole from