Sigwart, Christoph (1830–1904)

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SIGWART, CHRISTOPH
(1830–1904)

Christoph Sigwart, the German philosopher and logician, was born and died in Tübingen. He studied philosophy, theology, and mathematics there and taught in Halle from 1852 to 1855, before joining the theological seminar in Tübingen in 1855. He accepted a professorship at Blaubeuren in 1859 and returned to Tübingen as professor of philosophy, a position he held from 1865 to 1903. His doctoral dissertation was on Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. He also wrote on Friedrich Schleiermacher, Benedict de Spinoza, Huldrych Zwingli, and Giordano Bruno, as well as on ethics. His most important work was the two-volume Logik, a comprehensive treatise on the theory of knowledge.

The aim of logic, Sigwart maintained, is normative rather than descriptive. Logic is a regulative science whose aim should be to present a useful methodology for the extension of our knowledge. It is "the ethics rather than the physics of thought" and concerns itself not with an account of psychological processes but with finding the rules in accordance with which thought may achieve objective validity. Like ethics, logic is concerned with the question "What ought I to do?" The adequacy of thought lies not in its correspondence with an antecedently objective reality but in its satisfaction of human purposes. The overriding purpose of reasoning is to reach ideas that are necessary and universal for us, for human beings. Objective validity is essentially a matter of intersubjective agreement. The possibility of discovering the rules for necessary and universally valid thinking, however, depends also on an immediate awareness of self-evidence, a property that is possessed by necessary judgments. The experience of self-evidence is a postulate beyond which we cannot inquire. Logic strives to disclose the conditions under which this feeling occurs.

In Sigwart's philosophy there is a voluntarist element combined with respect for natural science, both of which evidently impressed William James. (James quoted from Sigwart in his essay "The Dilemma of Determinism.") Sigwart held that an activity of free and conscious willing is presupposed not only by ethics and metaphysics but by logic as well. Free will is presupposed by any distinction between correct and incorrect reasoning, since thinking must be a voluntary activity and not necessitated. The will is supreme in the realm of theory as well as in that of practice. The ultimate presupposition of all experience, and therefore of all thinking too, is not merely Immanuel Kant's "I think," which can accompany all ideas, but also "I will," which governs all acts of thought.

Sigwart's classification of the forms of judgments and categories presents judging as the basic cognitive function. Judgments are divided into simple narrative judgments, expressive of an immediate recognition ("This is Socrates"), and complex judgments, presupposing twofold and higher syntheses ("This cloud is red"). The discussion of existential judgments agrees with Kant in denying that existence, or "to be," adds anything to the content of an idea.

Sigwart was also interested in the work of men outside his own country; for example, the Logik contains a lengthy discussion of J. S. Mill on induction. Sigwart's ethical and metaphysical views were somewhat conventional: He held that progress in the development of the social order is an inevitable fact of history, and he argued that the attempt to make all our knowledge coherent inevitably leads to the idea of God.

Bibliography

works by sigwart

Spinozas neuentdeckter Traktat von Gott, dem Menschen und dessen Glückseligkeit. Gotha: R. Besser, 1866.

Logik. 2 vols. Tübingen, 1873 and 1878. 5th ed., Tübingen, 1924, contains Heinrich Maier's biography of Sigwart and a bibliography. Translated by Helen Dendy as Logic. 2 vols. London, 1890.

Vorfragen der Ethik. Freiburg, 1886.