Heinrich Scholz, the German theologian and logician, was born in Berlin. He professed an outspoken Platonism based on a profound knowledge of the history of metaphysics and of the logical works of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Bernard Bolzano, and Gottlob Frege. Scholz identified philosophy, in its original Platonic sense as the striving for universal knowledge, with the study of the foundations of mathematics and science. Thus, in Was ist Philosophie? (1940; Mathesis Universalis, pp. 341–387) he concluded, from Plato's demand for knowledge of geometry and a mathematical astronomy, that the axiomatic method is required for universal knowledge. He regarded mathematical logic as developed by Leibniz, Bolzano, Frege, Bertrand Russell, and others as the "epochale Gestalt" of metaphysica generalis. He opposed formalism in logic because it failed to provide for the semantics of formal languages, and he opposed constructivism because of its arbitrary anthropocentric limitations of logic.

Scholz's...