MAIER, HEINRICH. - Philosopher, b. at Heidenheim (Württemberg) on 5 Feb. 1867, d. at Berlin on 28 Nov. 1933. Having earned his doctorate 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.
Starting from Sigwart (v.) he insists on the importance of psychology for logic, without falling into psychologism (v.); and in the Psychologie des emotionalen Denkens (1908) he illuminates under various aspects this sphere of affective and volitional thought. 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 sets itself the goal of «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 cannot come to know reality except through our processes of consciousness, but reality is not resolved into the phenomena or the acts of the individual consciousness, nor even of a consciousness in general; reality is in itself and for itself.
M. has 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 (Melanchthon, Lavater, Strauss), 1909; Sokrates, 1913 (Italian trans. by G. Sanna, 2 vols., Florence 1943); Das geschichtl. Erkennen, 1914; Sittlicher Sozialismus oder Individualismus?, 1932.
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Andrea Ferro