Robert von Zimmermann

Robert von Zimmermann (Prague, 1824 - Prague, 1898) was a German-speaking philosopher, best known for his work on aesthetics within the academic philosophy of nineteenth-century Central Europe. He is remembered for one of the first systematic classifications of the arts in the German-speaking world of his time.

He studied philosophy, mathematics and the natural sciences at the universities of Prague and Vienna. After working as an assistant at the Vienna Observatory, he held professorships in philosophy at Olmütz (1850), at the Karls-Universität in Prague (1852) and at the University of Vienna from 1861. He had been a student of the mathematician and philosopher Bernard Bolzano, whose unfinished manuscripts passed to him, although his own interests led him to do little with them.

His main work, Aesthetics (1858-1865), separates three kinds of representation: material, found in architecture and sculpture; perceptual, found in painting and music; and of thought, which corresponds to literature. He also wrote on logic, on Leibniz and on philosophical anthropology, in works such as Philosophische Propädeutik (1852) and Anthroposophie (1882). His influence was mainly academic: one of his students in Vienna was Kazimierz Twardowski, a central figure of the Lvov-Warsaw school.