Gustav Teichmüller

Gustav Teichmüller (Braunschweig, 1832 – Dorpat, 1888) was a German philosopher working within the idealist tradition. His work had a reach that was unusual for a provincial academic: it shaped the development of Russian personalism and, according to several scholars, his ideas about perspective offered a starting point for Friedrich Nietzsche's perspectivism.

He studied philosophy in Berlin under Trendelenburg, a specialist in ancient thought, and completed his doctorate at Halle in 1856 with a dissertation on Aristotle's classification of forms of government. After working as a tutor in Saint Petersburg and teaching Greek and German, he became a lecturer at Göttingen. He then undertook a long journey through France, Spain, Greece, Italy, North Africa, the Levant and Asia Minor. He taught at Basel from 1868 and at Dorpat from 1871, remaining there until his death.

His early writings focused on Aristotle, in the three volumes of the Aristotelian Investigations. He later turned to the history of concepts, with the Studies in the History of Concepts. In his final period he drew a line between the real world and the apparent one: space, time and movement, he argued, are forms we project outward rather than features of reality itself. This line of thought, set out in The Real and Apparent Worlds (1882), is the work most often linked to Nietzsche.