Wolff and the First Fifty Years of German Metaphysics

Inbunden, Engelska, 2024

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Wolff and the First Fifty Years of German Metaphysics offers a fresh account of philosophical developments in German philosophy in the first half of the 18th century. At the centre of this book is Wolff's seminal text on metaphysics, the Deutsche Metaphysik of 1719, a text that modernized and advanced German philosophy but also provoked a vigorous intellectual controversy which informed and animated German thought through the decades until Kant's later philosophical revolution. Corey W. Dyck draws extensively on the wider intellectual context and Wolff's own early philosophical and scientific writings to provide a new and comprehensive account of Wolff's metaphysics, with particular emphasis on Wolff's views on the human soul and God. Dyck explores the impact of Wolff's text, beginning with a widely-neglected aspect of Wolff's reception in Germany, namely, the striking uptake of his philosophy among women intellectuals and Wolff's hostile reception by his Pietist colleagues. In the concluding chapters, a number of key metaphysical debates in the aftermath of the controversy between Wolff and the Pietists are considered. The reader is shown how these two opposed intellectual systems served as the indispensable frame for metaphysical inquiry-inspiring and shaping discussion among German thinkers-in the first half of the 18th century. In the end, this all points to the rich philosophical vein exposed through the opening of the fracture between Wolffianism and Pietism, and takes a step towards giving Wolff-but also his Pietist critics and the philosophers who took up positions between them-their rightful place at the beginning of the history of classical German metaphysics.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2024-12-05
Mått160 x 240 x 20 mm
Vikt608 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor298
FörlagOUP OXFORD
ISBN9780192865090

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Corey W. Dyck is Professor of Philosophy at Western University. He is the author of Kant and Rational Psychology, the translator and editor of Early Modern German Philosophy (1690-1750), and editor of the collection Women and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Germany. He has held visiting positions at the University of Oxford, the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, and at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, where he was also recently an Alexander von Humboldt research fellow.

Introduction Part I - Understanding Wolff's Deutsche Metaphysik 1: Wolff and the Refinement of the Mathematical Method 2: Wolff's Emendation of Ontology 3: Soul, World, and God: Wolff's Metaphysics Part II - Wolff's Impact and the Pietist Response 4: Women and the Wolffian Philosophy 5: The Abuse of Philosophy: Pietism and the Metaphysics of Freedom Part III - German Metaphysics in the First Half of the 18th Century 6: Reason beyond Proof: Debating the Use and Limits of the PSR 7: The Paradoxes of Sensation 8: G. F. Meier on the Fate of the Soul 9: Moses Mendelssohn and the Ghost of Spinoza

"Christian Wolff was the leading philosopher of Germany in the first half of the eighteenth century, but his reputation never recovered from Immanuel Kant's criticism of the "Leibniz-Wolffian" philosophy. Yet his synthesis of the best in both rationalism and empiricism was deeply influential on Kant's approach to philosophy, and remained a force throughout German idealism. Corey W. Dyck's own unique combination of philosophical acumen and profound scholarship yields an unparalleled study of Wolff's metaphysics in its historical context that will be indispensable reading for every student of German philosophy and indeed of the history of modern philosophy generally."