Wolff, Christian

Abstract Christian Wolff (1679–1754) was a philosopher, mathematician, and natural scientist of remarkable scope and astounding productivity (circa 50,000 published Pages), who ranks as the central figure of the pre‐Kantian German Enlightenment ( see Kant, Immanuel). Though Wolff is often considered primarily a theoretical philosopher whose contributions fall within ontology and metaphysics, this does not accord with Wolff's self‐understanding. His first published work, which gained him the attention of Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646–1716), was in ethics, and practical philosophy was the focus of his energies during the final 16 years of his life. Moreover, even when he was writing in theoretical fields, Wolff understood his work to be ultimately aimed at helping people to lead more rational lives. Many of his philosophical works during his initial appointment at the University of Halle as a professor of mathematics (1706–23) were written in German, which was unusual at the time, and was motivated by his Enlightenment project of making accessible to the general population their own capacities for adopting rational epistemic and practical policies. Wolff's terminological choices in these works proved pivotal for the subsequent development of German as a philosophically mature language, and thereby for German philosophy as a whole. Through his influence on students and others who read his works, Wolff was the first German philosopher to establish what could be considered a school. Wolff maintains a lasting influence on the history of ethics, especially through Kant, who reacted to Wolff in part through the Wolffians Gottfried Achenwall (1719–72), Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–62), and Georg Friedrich Meier (1718–77), whose works Kant used as textbooks on a regular basis.