Abstract

To assert its position as the “Queen of the sciences,” philosophy responded to the developing trend in the mid-19th century to divide psychology from philosophy by coining the battle slogan of ‘psychologism’. However, specifically with regard to the philosopher Jakob Friedrich Fries (1773–1843), who was viewed as the principal representative of psychologism, this appellation truly does not apply. Fries never took seriously any ‘anthropologized apriori’ of the kind represented by evolutionary epistemology (for example, Konrad Lorenz). For Fries, the laws of logic and mathematics and basic philosophical principles are objective; they are universally valid and necessary. Instead, Fries clearly differentiates between the universal and necessary validity of the apriori on the one side and the empirical methods for its discovery on the other.