Wolff and the First Fifty Years of German Metaphysics

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.

Corey W. Dyck, Professor of Philosophy, University of Western Ontario

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.