1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Brandis, Christian August

BRANDIS, CHRISTIAN AUGUST (1790–1867), German philologist and historian of philosophy, was born at Hildesheim and educated at Kiel University. In 1812 he graduated at Copenhagen, with a thesis Commentationes Eleaticae (a collection of fragments from Xenophanes, Parmenides and Melissus). For a time he studied at Göttingen, and in 1815 presented as his inaugural dissertation at Berlin his essay Von dem Begriff der Geschichte der Philosophie. In 1816 he refused an extraordinary professorship at Heidelberg in order to accompany B. G. Niebuhr to Italy as secretary to the Prussian embassy. Subsequently he assisted I. Bekker in the preparation of his edition of Aristotle. In 1821 he became professor of philosophy in the newly founded university of Bonn, and in 1823 published his Aristotelius et Theophrasti Metaphysica. With Boeckh and Niebuhr he edited the Rheinisches Museum, to which he contributed important articles on Socrates (1827, 1829). In 1836–1839 he was tutor to the young king Otho of Greece. His great work, the Handbuch der Geschichte der griechisch-röm. Philos. (1835–1866; republished in a smaller and more systematic form, Gesch. d. Entwickelungen d. griech. Philos., 1862–1866), is characterized by sound criticism. Brandis died on the 21st of July 1867.

See Trendelenburg, Zur Erinnerung an C. A. B. (Berlin, 1868).