Christian Wolff’s German Ethics: New Essays

This volume offers collective exploration of major aspects of Christian Wolff’s ethics. It focuses on what is arguably Wolff’s most important and influential text on moral philosophy, namely his Rational Thoughts on the Action and Omission of Human Beings for the Promotion of their Happiness, originally published in 1720 and commonly referred to as the German Ethics to distinguish it from his later Latin works on ethics.

The contributions cover a range of topics, including the systematic structure of the text itself and the relation between Wolff’s ethics and the preceding natural law tradition, and many of the chapters consider the development of the basic tenets of Wolff’s moral theory in his later Latin writings. Throughout the volume, special attention is given to the core concepts of Wolff’s moral philosophy, such as obligation, perfection, the highest good, and happiness. Other notable topics include Wolff’s conception of moral judgment and moral education, as well as the role of psychology and anthropology in his ethical thought. The volume also includes discussion of the influence of Wolff’s ethics on subsequent figures such as C.A. Crusius, G.F. Meier, and Kant. As a whole, the volume seeks to show the importance of Wolff’s German Ethics within the history of ethics as well as inspire others to engage with his thought.

Sonja Schierbaum, Ph.D. (2012), is currently leader of the Emmy Noether research group ＂Practical Reasons Before Kant (1720-1780)＂ at the University of WÃ1/4rzburg. She has published several papers and book chapters on eighteenth-century German ethics, moral psychology, and epistemology. She also has research interests in late medieval philosophy. She is the author of Ockham’s Assumption of Mental Speech: Thinking in a World of Particulars (Brill, 2014) and has co-edited a volume on late-medieval conceptions of self-knowledge (with Dominik Perler, Klostermann, 2014).

Michael Walschots received his PhD from the University of Western Ontario, Canada in 2016 and has since held postdoctoral positions in Scotland, Canada, and Germany. He has published widely on the historical context of Kant’s moral philosophy in journals such as Kant-Studien, History of Philosophy Quarterly, Archiv fÃ1/4r Geschichte der Philosophie, and Ergo and has received grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation

John Walsh is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. He took his PhD in 2018 from the University of South Florida and has been a Visiting Research Fellow at Brown University and at UniversitÃ(c) de Fribourg. He has published several book chapters and journal articles on the intersection of metaphysics and ethics in Classical German Philosophy.