Wolff, Christian

Christian Wolff (1679–1754) was a philosopher, mathematician, and natural scientist of remarkable scope and astounding productivity, who ranks as the central figure of the pre‐Kantian German Enlightenment. Although Wolff is often considered primarily to be a theoretical philosopher whose contributions fall within ontology and metaphysics, this does not accord with his 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 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. He 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.