Friedrich Jodl ranks as one of the most significant representatives of German positivism, although this designation by no means adequately characterizes the full scope of his ideas. Jodl was born in Munich, where in 1880 he qualified as a Privatdozent in philosophy. Five years later he was named professor of philosophy at the German University in Prague. In 1896 he accepted a call to the University of Vienna. His many publications ranged over the fields of philosophy and the history of philosophy and ethics, as well as psychology and aesthetics.

Jodl categorically rejected metaphysical speculation. For him, the boundaries of experience were at the same time the boundaries of knowledge; hence, there could be no a priori knowledge, nor any metaphysical cognition of the transcendental. The task of philosophy, he maintained, is to order scientific knowledge systematically and to comprehend it in a unified view of...