Christoph Gottfried Bardili (18 May 17615 June 1808) was a German philosopher and cousin of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. He was critical of Kantian idealism and proposed his own system of philosophy known as rational realism, a view based purely upon "thinking as thinking".[1]
Bardili was born on 18 May 1761 in Blaubeuren in the Duchy of Württemberg. In 1786 he became a Repentant at the Stift, a Protestant theological college in Tübingen. In 1790 he became a professor of philosophy at the Karlsschule in Stuttgart. After the closing of the Karlschule in 1794, he became a professor of philosophy at the Stuttgart Gymnasium Illustre where he taught until his death on 5 June 1808.
He dissented strongly from the Kantian distinction between matter and form of thought, and urged that philosophy should consider only thought in itself, pure thought, the ground or possibility of being.
The fundamental principle of thought is, according to him, the law of identity; logical thinking is real thinking. The matter upon which thought operated is in itself indefinite and is rendered definite through the action of thought. Bardili worked out his idea in a one-sided manner. He held that thought has in itself no power of development, and ultimately reduced it to arithmetical computation.[2]
According to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition:
Bardili died in .