Work · Rationalism
Rational Thoughts on God, the World and the Soul of Man (German Metaphysics)
Textbook in German in numbered paragraphs: from the certainty of one’s own existence and the principles of contradiction and sufficient reason to ontology, the soul, the world and God; it set the frame of German school metaphysics until Kant.
Introduction
The “Rational Thoughts on God, the World and the Soul of Man, and on All Things in General”, Wolff’s “German Metaphysics”, appeared at the end of 1719 with 1720 on the title page and went through many editions. Written in German for students rather than in Latin, it proceeds in numbered paragraphs from the certainty of one’s own existence and the principles of contradiction and sufficient reason to an ontology of things in general, then to the soul as known by experience, to the world as a connection of things like a machine, to the essence of the soul, and finally to God. Leibniz’s pre-established harmony between soul and body appears as the most probable hypothesis. Pietist theologians in Halle, above all Joachim Lange, read the book as fatalism; the dispute contributed to Wolff’s expulsion in 1723, and he defended the work in a volume of notes (1724). Its order of topics became the frame of German school metaphysics, which Kant taught from Baumgarten’s textbook and criticised in the Critique of Pure Reason.
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