Alois Riehl

Alois Riehl (Bolzano, 1844 – Berlin, 1924) was an Austrian philosopher, born in Bozen, then part of the Austrian Empire and now in Italy. He is usually placed within neo-Kantianism, though his thought began in the Herbartian realism that shaped Austrian philosophy in his youth. His lasting contribution was to present philosophy as a critique of knowledge rather than a picture of the world.

He studied in Vienna, Munich, Innsbruck and Graz. He earned his doctorate at Innsbruck in 1868 and qualified as a university lecturer at Graz in 1870. He taught philosophy at Graz, at Freiburg (where he succeeded Windelband), at Kiel, at Halle and finally at the University of Berlin. In Berlin he commissioned Mies van der Rohe to design his house in Neubabelsberg. His main works include The Philosophical Criticism and Its Significance for Positive Science, Logic and Theory of Knowledge, and a study of Nietzsche as artist and thinker.

His central claim is that philosophy should concern its own proper object: the scientific investigation of consciousness, its objects and its laws. This separates philosophy, which studies mental products, from psychology, which studies mental processes. His critical realism and monism aim to overcome the divide between the physical and the mental. His students included Spengler, Scholz and Spranger.