Wolff and the First Fifty Years of German Metaphysics

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."