Pfleiderer, OTTO, a great philosophic theologian of Protestant Germany, was born at Stetten, near Cannstadt in Württemberg, September 1, 1839; studied under Baur, at Tübingen, from 1857 till 1861, and next paid a visit of study to England and Scotland; became pastor at Heilbronn in 1868, and superintendent at Jena in 1870, an office which in the same year he exchanged for the chair of Theology there. In 1875 he was called to be professor of Systematic Theology at Berlin. In New Testament criticism Pfeiderer belongs to the younger critical school which has grown out of the impulse given by Baur. But he is not the less an independent thinker, acute, suggestive, and profoundly learned, and he has made his name as well known in England and America as in Germany by a series of works which no serious student of philosophy or theology can afford to overlook. Of these the chief are Die Religion, ihr Wesen und ihre Geschichte (2 vols. 1869; 2d ed. 1878); Der Paulinismus (1873; 2d ed. 1890; Eng. trans. 2 vols. 1877); Religions-philosophie auf geschichtlicher Grundlage (2 vols. 1878; 2d ed. 1883–84; Eng. trans. 4 vols. 1886–88); Zur religiösen Verständigung (1879); Grundriss der Christlichen Glaubens und Sittenlehre (1880; 4th ed. 1888); The Influence of the Apostle Paul on Christianity, the Hibbert Lectures for 1885; Das Unchristentum (1887); The Development of Theology since Kant (Lond. 1890); and The Philosophy and Development of Religion, the Gifford Lectures for 1894.
His brother, EDMUND PFLEIDEERER, born at Stettin 12th October 1842, studied at Tübingen, and after a short experience as a pastor was made professor of Philosophy at Kiel in 1873, whence he was called to Tübingen in 1878. His writings include studies on Leibnitz (1870), on Empiricism and Scepticism in Hume's Philosophy (1874), modern Pessimism (1875), Kantian criticism and English philosophy (1881), Arnold Geulinx (1884), Lotze (2d ed. 1884), Heraclitus of Ephesus (1886), &c.