Alois Riehl, the Austrian neo-Kantian philosopher, was born in Bolzano. Riehl was consecutively Privatdozent (1870), extraordinary professor (1877), and professor (1878) at the University of Graz. He moved to the University of Freiburg in 1882, to Kiel in 1895, to Halle in 1898, and to Berlin in 1905.

Riehl's first philosophy was a realistic metaphysics based on Johann Friedrich Herbart and indirectly on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and it is of interest, just as in the case of Immanuel Kant, to study the relation between Riehl's precritical and critical writings. Between 1870 and 1872 Riehl made his first realistic, monistic, evolutionist decisions within that dogmatic framework. His Realistische Grundzüge (Graz, 1870) centered on the problem of sensation, which he originally conceived as a polycentric reciprocal matrix of consciousness and movement. In Über Begriff und Form der Philosophie (Berlin, 1872) he advocated a critical, rational requirement and the scientific character of philosophy, to which he assigned...