BOUTERWEK

bouterwek, friedrich (1766-1828), german philosopher and critic, was born at oker, near goslar in lower saxony, and studied law at gottingen. from 1790, however, he became a disciple of kant, published _aphorismen nach kants lehre vorgelegt_ (1793), and became professor of philosophy at gottingen (1802), where he died on the 9th of august 1828. as a philosopher, he is interesting for his criticism of the theory of the "thing-in-itself" (_ding-an-sich_). for the pure reason, as described in the _kritik_, the "thing-in-itself" can be only an inconceivable "something-in-general"; any statement about it involves the predication of reality, unity and plurality, which belong not to the absolute thing but to phenomena. on the other hand, the subject is known by the fact of will, and the object by that of resistance; the cognizance of willing is the assertion of absolute reality in the domain of relative knowledge. this doctrine has since been described as absolute virtualism. following this train of thought, bouterwek left the kantian position through his opposition to its formalism. in later life he inclined to the views of f.h. jacobi, whose letters to him (published at gottingen, 1868) shed much light on the development of his thought. his chief philosophical works are _ideen zu einer allgemeinen apodiktik_ (gottingen and halle, 1799); _aesthetik_ (leipzig, 1806; gottingen, 1815 and 1824); _lehrbuch der philos. vorkenntnisse_ (gottingen, 1810 and 1820); _lehrbuch der philos. wissenschaften_ (gottingen, 1813 and 1820). in these works he dissociated himself from the kantian school. his chief critical work was the _geschichte der neuern poesie und beredsamkeit_ (gottingen, 12 vols., 1801-1819), of which the history of spanish literature has been published separately in french, spanish and english. the _geschichte_ is a work of wide learning and generally sound criticism, but it is not of equal merit throughout. he also wrote three novels, _paulus septimus_ (halle, 1795), _graf donamar_ (gottingen, 1791) and _ramiro_ (leipzig, 1804), and published a collection of poems (gottingen, 1802).