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This volume offers a collective exploration of the moral philosophy of Christian Wolff, one of the great philosophers of the 18th century. The contributors discuss major themes in Wolff's
German Ethics of 1720, showing the importance of this work within the history of ethics and its continuing interest today.
List of contents
- Introduction
- Part I. The German Ethics in Its Historical Context
- 1: Clemens Schwaiger: The Systematic Structure of Wolff's German Ethics in Context
- 2: Frank Grunert: Natural Law as a Theory of Practical Philosophy: The Relationship Between Natural Law and Ethics in Christian Wolff's Practical Philosophy
- 3: Ursula Goldenbaum: Wolff's Powerful Concept of Perfection and its Roots
- 4: Stefanie Buchenau: Wolff's Modern Stoicism: Ethics, Politics, and Cosmopolitanism
- Part II. Metaphysical and Conceptual Foundations
- 5: John Walsh: Wolff on Obligation
- 6: Matteo Favaretti Camposampiero: Objective Morality: Wolff and the Impious Hypothesis
- 7: Emanuel Lanzini: Is Christian Wolff's Practical Philosophy Eudaimonistic?
- 8: Timothy Rosenkoetter: Perfection and the Foundations of Wolff's German Ethics
- Part III. Duty and Agency
- 9: Paul Guyer: Perfectionism and Duties to Self in Wolff and Kant
- 10: Michael Walschots: Wolff on the Duty to Cognize Good and Evil
- 11: Stefano Bacin: Wolff, the Pursuit of Perfection, and What We Owe to Each Other: The Case of Veracity and Lying
- 12: Sonja Schierbaum: Can the Will Go Wrong on Its Own? Wolff's Conception of a Deficit of the Will
- Part IV. Method and Reception
- 13: Courtney Fugate: Wolff's Ethical Experimentalism and its Roots in his German Ethics
- 14: Corey W. Dyck: Human Nature and Human Minds: Wolff's Moral Anthropology
- 15: Paola Rumore: Secunda et adversa fortuna: Wolff and Meier on the Moral Relevance of Good Fortune and Misfortune
- 16: Tinca Prunea-Bretonnet: Wolff and Crusius on the Duty to Love
About the author
Sonja Schierbaum, Ph.D. (2012), is currently leader of the Emmy Noether research group "Practical Reasons Before Kant (1720-1780)" at the University of Würzburg. 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 für 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 Université de Fribourg. He has published several book chapters and journal articles on the intersection of metaphysics and ethics in Classical German Philosophy.
Summary
This volume offers a collective exploration of the moral philosophy of Christian Wolff, one of the great philosophers of the 18th century. The contributors discuss major themes in Wolff's German Ethics of 1720, showing the importance of this work within the history of ethics and its continuing interest today.
