Abstract
Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg, who today is mostly known for his work on Aristotle’s Categories and De Anima, also had a strong interest in Aristotle’s moral philosophy. This chapter offers a critical appraisal of Trendelenburg’s attempt, well before the virtue ethics of the 20th century, to make Aristotelian ethics a viable alternative to Kant’s deontological theory. The difficulty, however, in Trendelenburg’s interpretation, as Philipp Brüllmann argues, is that he makes Aristotle’s ethics out to be precisely what most interpreters think it is not: an ethics based on principles. Still, Trendelenburg’s attempt to rehabilitate Aristotle’s ethics may serve as an early example of what would later become a larger philosophical movement in English-language philosophy.
