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Georg Anton Friedrich Ast (German: [ast]) was a German philosopher and philologist. He is known principally for his work during the last twenty-five years of his life on the dialogues of Plato. He died in Munich.
His Plato's Leben and Schriften (1816), which originated in the Introductions of Friedrich Schleiermacher and the historical scepticism of Niebuhr and Friedrich August Wolf, was the first of those critical inquiries into the life and works of Plato.
The work was followed by a complete edition of Plato's works (2 vols., 1819–1832) with a Latin translation and commentary. His last work was the Lexicon Platonicum (3 vols., 1834–1839), which is both valuable and comprehensive. In his works on aesthetics he combined the views of Schelling with those of Winckelmann, Lessing, Kant, Herder, Schiller and others. His histories of philosophy are marked more by critical scholarship than by originality of thought, though they are interesting as asserting the now familiar principle that the history of philosophy is not the history of opinions, but of reason as a whole; he was among the first to attempt to formulate a principle of the development of thought. [1]
Beside his works on Plato, he wrote, on aesthetics, System der Kunstlehre (1805) and Grundriß der Aesthetik (1807); on the history of philosophy, Grundlinien der Philosophie (1807, republished 1809, but soon forgotten), Grundriß einer Geschichte der Philosophie (1807 and 1825), and Hauptmomente der Geschichte der Philosophie (1829); in philology, Grundlinien der Philologie (1808), and Grundlinien der Grammatik, Hermeneutik und Kritik (1808).