The Law of Nations Treated According to the Scientific Method. Christian von Wolff

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      [print edition page ix]

       INTRODUCTION

      Christian Wolff (1679–1754) was one of the most famous and influential German thinkers in the first half of the eighteenth century. He began his academic career as a mathematician, but over the course of almost five decades he taught and wrote on nearly every aspect of eighteenth-century philosophy, including the human mind, economics, political science, and physics, as well as logic, metaphysics, ontology, natural theology, natural law, and moral philosophy. Uniting Wolff’s many different intellectual pursuits was his commitment to the “scientific method.” This method, as Wolff understood it, was a form of reasoning that began from principles that were certain, and in which all steps of the argument were so closely linked to each other that the conclusions to which they led were necessarily true.¹ Although the “scientific method” was exemplified particularly well by mathematics, Wolff believed that it was also applicable to philosophical argument. Wolff’s Law of Nations is one example of the “scientific method.” He published this work in 1749, toward the end of his life, after his triumphant return to the territories of the Prussian king, from which he had been banished in 1723 after his philosophy had been judged offensive and dangerous by the then ruler, Frederick William I. In this introduction a brief biography of Wolff will be followed by a discussion of the main principles of his “scientific method” and a short note on the text and translation of his Law of Nations.

      [print edition page x]

      Christian Wolff (1679–1754)

      Christian Wolff was born in 1679 in Breslau, a flourishing and wealthy Silesian city of around 40,000 inhabitants.² The dominant religious confession in Breslau was Lutheranism, but the city also had a significant Catholic population because the province of Silesia was under Austrian Habsburg rule. СКАЧАТЬ