AST

ast, georg anton friedrich (1778-1841), german philosopher and philologist, was born at gotha. educated there and at the university of jena, he became privat-docent at jena in 1802. in 1805 he became professor of classical literature in the university of landshut, where he remained till 1826, when it was transferred to munich. there he lived till his death on the 31st of october 1841. in recognition of his work he was made an aulic councillor and a member of the bavarian academy of sciences. he is known principally for his work during the last twenty-five years of his life on the dialogues of plato. his _platon's leben und schriften_ (1816) was the first of those critical inquiries into the life and works of plato which originated in the _introductions_ of schleiermacher and the historical scepticism of niebuhr and wolf. distrusting tradition, he took a few of the finest dialogues as his standard, and from internal evidence denounced as spurious not only those which are generally admitted to be so (_epinomis, minos, theages, arastae, clitophon, hipparchus, eryxias, letters and definitions_), but also the _meno, euthydemus, charmides, lysis, laches, first and second alcibiades, hippias major and minor, ion, euthyphro, apology, crito_, and even (against aristotle's explicit assertion) _the laws_. the genuine dialogues he divides into three series:--(1) the earliest, marked chiefly by the poetical and dramatic element, i.e. _protagoras, phaedrus, gorgias, phaedo_; (2) the second, marked by dialectic subtlety, i.e. _theaetetus, sophist, statesman, parmenides, cratylus_; (3) the third group, combining both qualities harmoniously, i.e. the _philebus, symposium, republic, timaeus, critias_. the work was followed by a complete edition of plato's works (11 vols., 1819-1832) with a latin translation and commentary. his last work was the _lexicon platonicum_ (3 vols., 1834-1839), which is both valuable and comprehensive. in his works on aesthetics he combined the views of schelling with those of winckelmann, lessing, kant, herder, schiller and others. his histories of philosophy are marked more by critical scholarship than by originality of thought, though they are interesting as asserting the now familiar principle that the history of philosophy is not the history of opinions, but of reason as a whole; he was among the first to attempt to formulate a principle of the development of thought. beside his works on plato, he wrote, on aesthetics, _system der kunstlehre_ (1805) and _grundriss der aesthetik_ (1807); on the history of philosophy, _grundlinien der philosophie_ (1807, republished 1809, but soon forgotten), _grundriss einer geschichte der philosophie_ (1807 and 1825), and _hauptmomente der geschichte der philosophie_ (1829); in philology, _grundlinien der philologie_ (1808), and _grundlinien der grammatik, hermeneutik und kritik_ (1808).