MAIER, HEINRICH. – Philosopher, born in Heidenheim (Württemberg) on 5 February 1867, died in Berlin on 28 November 1933. Having graduated in philosophy at Tübingen (1892), he taught philosophy at the Universities of Zurich (1900), Tübingen (1902), Göttingen (1911), Heidelberg (1918), and from 1922 at Berlin.
SEGATO (v.), he insists on the importance of psychology for logic, psychologism (v.); and in Psychologie des emotionaux Denkens (1908) he illuminates this sphere of affective and volitional thought from various perspectives. In his principal work, in three volumes, Philosophie der Wirklichkeit (Tübingen 1926-35), he presents a philosophy of the forms of reality that culminates in metaphysics and proposes «a synthesis of the idealism of today with the naturalism of yesterday, of the a priori-rationalistic way of thinking of the present generation with the positivism and criticism of the preceding one». The path that the theory of knowledge must follow is from truth to reality; the conclusion at which it must arrive is that truth and reality are completely distinct. We can arrive at knowledge of reality only through our processes of consciousness, but reality cannot be reduced to the phenomena or acts of individual consciousness, nor even to those of consciousness in general; reality exists in and of itself.
M. also published, with notes, Sigwart’s Logik (2 vols., 1924), to whom he had previously devoted an essay: Logik und Erkenntnistheorie, 1918. Among his other works: Die Syllogistik des Aristoteles, 3 vols., 1896-1900; An der Grenze der Philosophie (Melanchton, Lavater, Strauss), 1909; Sokrates, 1913 (Italian translation by G. Sanna, 2 vols., Florence 1943); Das geschichtl. Erkennen, 1914; Sittlicher Sozialismus oder Individualismus?, 1932.