In existographies, Christian Wolff (1679-1754) (IQ:160|#505) (CR:2) was a German philosopher and mathematician, characterized a “great genius” (Mettrie, 1747), who tended to argue, synthetically, via a mixture of rationalism, empiricism, Newtonianism, and scholasticism (Blackwell, 1961), generally considered (Vidal, 2011) the world’s leading philosopher in the years 1716, the dereaction of Leibniz, to the 1780s, with the rise of Kant’s critical philosophy, whose vast works, supposedly, cover all areas of knowledge, noted for []
Genius | Rankings
In German geniuses, Wolff tends to be ranked, along with Christian Thomasius [RGM:263|1,360+], and Moses Mendelssohn [RGM:944|1,360+], as precursors to Immanuel Kant [RGM:20|1,360+] and empirical psychology. [3]
Soul | Theory
In 1732, Wolf, in his Empirical Psychology, building, in modified form, on Descartes, argued the following:
“Whatever being is actually conscious of itself and of other things outside of itself exists. We are conscious of ourselves and of other things outside of ourselves. Therefore we exist.”
— Christian Wolf (1732), Empirical Psychology (pg. 16)
Herein, and in his Rational Psychology (1734), he went on to argue that the soul was “that in us that was conscious”, or something to this effect.
Quotes | On
The following are quotes on Wolff:
“We can, and even should, admire all those great geniuses – Descartes, Malebranche, Leibniz, Wolff, etc. – in their most futile labors; but pray, what fruits have we derived from their profound meditations and all their works? We should see not what people have thought, but what we should think for the sake of an untroubled life.’”
— Julien la Mettrie (1747), Man: a Machine (pg. 5) [1]
References
1. Blackwell, Richard J. (1961). “Christian Wolff’s Doctrine of the Soul” (Ѻ), Journal of the History of Ideas, 22(3):339-54.
2. La Mettrie, Julien. (1751). Machine Man and Other Writings: Treatise on the Soul, Man as Plant, The System of Epicurus, Anti-Seneca or the Sovereign Good, Preliminary Discourse (translator and editor: Ann Thomson) (pg. 5). Cambridge University Press, 1996.
3. Watson, Peter. (2010). The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution and the Twentieth Century (pg. #). Simon & Schuster.
Further reading
● Vidal, Fernando. (2011). The Sciences of the Soul: the Early Modern Origins of the Psychology (§:The New Psychology: Christian Wolff, pgs. 89-). University of Chicago Press.
External links
● Christian Wolf (philosopher) – Wikipedia.
