Michael Josef Fesl

The most important and extensive of Bernard Bolzano’s (1781–1848) correspondences is the one with his student and friend Michael Josef Fesl (1788–1864). In total, the two exchanged around 730 letters. Due to the large number of letters in the Bernard-Bolzano-Gesamtausgabe, only the letters from the teacher to his student are published from 1831 onwards, so Fesl's letters to Bolzano appear in the Beiträge zur Bolzano-Forschung. Of the at least 70 letters that Fesl wrote to his “most beloved teacher and friend” in the years 1846 to 1848, only 45 are printed in this volume, as the remaining letters (all from 1848) have been lost. The letters that have survived give us an insight into Fesl's efforts to provide to Bolzano's last publications as wide an audience as possible, e.g. the biography of Dr. Vincenz Julius von Krombholz (1845) and the essay “On Charity” (1847). Equally important, however, is the discussion of works that only appeared after Bolzano's death, such as the treatises “What Is Philosophy?” (1849) and “The Classification of Fine Arts” (1849) as well as the “Paradoxes of the Infinite” (1851). In addition, Fesl also writes about Bolzano's health and political issues, and he gives reports on the situation in Vienna.