Leibniz and Kant Brandon C Look Editor Full Chapter PDF

Leibniz and Kant Brandon C.
Look
(Editor)
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/leibniz-and-kant-brandon-c-look-editor/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...
Forgiveness and Its Moral Dimensions Brandon Warmke
https://ebookmass.com/product/forgiveness-and-its-moral-
dimensions-brandon-warmke/
Look Closer Lewis Stewart
https://ebookmass.com/product/look-closer-lewis-stewart/
Kant and the Law of War Arthur Ripstein
https://ebookmass.com/product/kant-and-the-law-of-war-arthur-
ripstein/
The Leibniz-Caroline-Clarke Correspondence Gregory

Brown
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-leibniz-caroline-clarke-
correspondence-gregory-brown/
Leibniz on Time, Space, and Relativity Richard T. W.
Arthur
https://ebookmass.com/product/leibniz-on-time-space-and-
relativity-richard-t-w-arthur/
Leibniz on Time, Space, and Relativity Richard T. W.

Arthur
https://ebookmass.com/product/leibniz-on-time-space-and-
relativity-richard-t-w-arthur-2/
Kant, Race, and Racism Huaping Lu-Adler
https://ebookmass.com/product/kant-race-and-racism-huaping-lu-
adler/
Leibniz on the Problem of Evil Paul Rateau
https://ebookmass.com/product/leibniz-on-the-problem-of-evil-
paul-rateau/
Sleep Through Insomnia Brandon R. Peters
https://ebookmass.com/product/sleep-through-insomnia-brandon-r-
peters-2/
Leibniz and Kant
Leibniz and Kant
Edited by
BRANDON C. LOOK
1
1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Oxford University Press 2021
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
First Edition published in 2021
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020945751
ISBN 978–0–19–960636–8
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780199606368.001.0001
Printed and bound by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
Acknowledgments
The majority of chapters in this volume were originally delivered at a conference

of the Leibniz Society of North America in conjunction with the North American
Kant Society and held at the University of Kentucky in September 2009. I wish to
thank the College of Arts & Sciences and the Department of Philosophy as well as
the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany in Chicago for their
financial support of that conference. I would also like to thank the participants of
that conference, the contributors to this volume, and Peter Momtchiloff for their
extraordinary patience while this volume was completed.
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 30/07/21, SPi
Contents
List of Abbreviations ix
List of Contributors xiii
1. Kant’s Leibniz: A Historical and Philosophical Study 1

Brandon C. Look (University of Kentucky)
2. How Kant was Never a Wolffian, or, Estimating Forces to
Enforce Influxus Physicus 27
Ursula Goldenbaum (Emory University)
3. Breaking with Rationalism: Kant, Crusius, and the
Priority of Existence 57
Eric Watkins (University of California, San Diego)
4. Leibniz on the Ideality of Space 79
Donald Rutherford (University of California, San Diego)
5. Leibniz and the Transcendental Deduction 112
Alison Laywine (McGill University)
6. Bodies, Matter, Monads, and Things in Themselves 142
Nicholas F. Stang (University of Toronto)
7. Kant and the (Alleged) Leibnizian Misconception of the
Difference between Sensible and Intellectual Representations 177
Anja Jauernig (New York University)
8. Kant’s Amphiboly as Critique of Leibniz 211
Martha Brandt Bolton (Rutgers University)
9. The Teleologies of Leibniz and Kant: So Close Yet So Far Apart 233
Paul Guyer (Brown University)
10. Kant’s Theory of Divine and Secondary Causation 265
Des Hogan (Princeton University)
11. The Development of Kant’s Conception of Divine Freedom 295
Patrick Kain (Purdue University)
12. Leibniz and Kant on Empirical Miracles: Rationalism,
Freedom, and the Laws 320
Andrew Chignell (Princeton University)
Bibliography 355
Index 375
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 30/07/21, SPi
List of Abbreviations
Unless otherwise noted translations of the works of Leibniz, Kant and other historical
figures are from the standard English-language editions.
A Leibniz, G. W. 1923–. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Sämtliche Schriften

und Briefe. Ed. Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften. Darmstadt
and Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Cited by series, volume and
page number.
A/B Kant, Immanuel. 1998. Kritik der reinen Vernunft (in Ak. 3 and 4).
Translations from Critique of Pure Reason. Ed. and trans. Paul Guyer
and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cited
according to the first (A) and second (B) edition page numbers.
AG Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. 1989. Philosophical Essays. Ed. and trans.
Roger Ariew and Dan Garber. Indianapolis: Hackett. [= AG]
Ak Kant, Immanuel. 1902– . Kants gesammelte Schriften. Berlin: Königlich
preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (now Walter de Gruyter).
Cited by volume and page number.
Anon-K2 Transcriptions of metaphysics lectures from early 1790s (in Ak. 28).
Anth Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (in Ak. 7). “Anthropology
from a Pragmatic Point of View.” In: Anthropology, History and
Education. Ed. Günter Zöller and Robert Loudent. Trans. Robert
Loudent. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 231–429.
AT Descartes, René. 1897–1913. Oeuvres de Descartes. Ed. Charles Adam
and Paul Tannery. 12 vols. Paris: L. Cerf. Cited by volume and
page number.
BDG Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins
Gottes (in Ak. 2). “The Only Possible Argument in Support of a
Demonstration the Existence of God.” In: Immanuel Kant, Theoretical
Philosophy, 1755–1770. Ed. and trans. D. Walford. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992.
C Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. 1903. Opuscules et Fragments Inédits de
Leibniz. Ed. Louis Couturat.) Paris: Félix Alcan, 1903. (Repr.
Hildesheim: Olms, 1988.)
CSM Descartes, René. 1985. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. 2 vols.
Ed. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cited by volume and
page number.
D Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. 1768. Opera omnia, nunc primum col-
lecta . . . . 6 vols. Ed. Louis Dutens. Geneva. (Repr. Hildesheim: Olms,
1989.) Cited by volume and page number.
x List of Abbreviations
DM Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Discourse on Metaphysics (in A VI 4,

1629–1688; in AG 35–68). Cited by section number.
EEKU Erste Einleitung in die Kritik der Urteilskraft (in Ak. 20). First
Introduction to the Critique of the Power of Judgment. In: Critique of
the Power of Judgment. Ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
FM Welches sind die wirklichen Fortschritte, die die Metaphysik seit
Leibnitzens und Wolf ’s Zeiten in Deutschland gemacht hat? (in Ak. 20).
“What Real Progress has Metaphysics Made in Germany Since the
Time of Leibniz and Wolff?” In Theoretical Philosophy after 1781. Ed.
Henry Allison and Peter Heath. Trans. Peter Heath. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 349–412.
GM Leibniz, G. W. 1849–1863. Leibnizens mathematische Schriften. 7 vols.
Ed. C. I. Gerhardt. Halle: Schmidt. (Repr. Hildesheim: Olms, 1971.)
Cited by volume and page number.
GMS Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (Ak. 4). “Groundwork for the
Metaphysics of Morals.” In: Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy. Ed.
and trans. Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996, pp. 37–108.
GP Leibniz, G. W. 1875–1890. G. W. Leibniz: Die philosophischen Schriften.
Ed. C. I. Gerhardt. 7 vols. Berlin: Weidmann. (Repr. Hildesheim: Olms,
1965.) Cited by volume and page number.
GW Wolff, Christian. 1962– . Gesammelte Werke. Ed. Jean École et al.
Hildesheim: Olms. Cited by division, volume and page number.
H Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. 1985. Theodicy. Ed. and trans.
E. M. Huggard. La Salle, IL: Open Court.
KpV Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (Ak. 5). Immanuel Kant, Critique of
Practical Reason. In: Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy. Ed. and
trans. Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996,
pp. 133–271.
KrV Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Ak. 3 and 4). Immanuel Kant. English
translations from Critique of Pure Reason. Ed. and trans. Paul Guyer
and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cited
according to first (A) and second (B) edition page numbers noted as
stated above.
KU Kritik der Urteilskraft (Ak. 5). Critique of the Power of Judgment. Ed.
and trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000.
L Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. 1969. Philosophical Papers and Letters.
Ed. and trans. Leroy E. Loemker. 2nd ed. Dordrecht and Boston:
Reidel.
LA Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. 1967. The Leibniz–Arnauld Correspondence.
Ed. and trans. H. T. Mason. Introduction by G. H. R. Parkinson.
Manchester: Manchester University Press.
List of Abbreviations xi
LC Leibniz’s letters to Samuel Clarke. From GP VII 352–420. Cited by

letter and section number. Translations from The Leibniz-Clarke

Correspondence. Ed. H. G. Alexander. Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1956.
LDB Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. 2007. The Leibniz–Des Bosses
Correspondence. Ed. and trans. Brandon C. Look and Donald
Rutherford. New Haven: Yale University Press.
LH Die Leibniz-Handschriften der königlichen öffentlichen Bibliothek zu
Hannover. Ed. Eduard Bodemann. Hanover and Leipzig: Hann’sche
Buchhandlung. Cited according to Bodemann’s classification.
Log Logik (in Ak. 9). “The Jäsche Logic.” In: Immanuel Kant, Lectures on
Logic. Ed. and trans. Michael Young. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992, pp. 527–640.
MAN Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaften (Ak. 4).
Immanuel Kant, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. In
Theoretical Philosophy after 1781. Ed. Henry Allison and Peter Heath.
Trans. Michael Friedman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002, pp. 181–270.
MKTI Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Meditations on Knowledge, Truth and
Ideas (in A VI 4, 585–592; in AG 23–27).
Mon Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Monadology (in GP VI 607–623; in AG
213–225). Cited by section number.
MP Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Philosophical Writings. Ed. Mary Morris
and G. H. R. Parkinson. London: Everyman, 1995.
MSI De Mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et Principiis (Ak. 2). “On
the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World”
(Inaugural Dissertation). In: Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy,
1755–1770. Ed. and trans. D. Walford. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992, pp. 373–426.
OCM Malebranche, Nicolas. 1958–1984. Oeuvres complètes de Malebranche.
Ed. André Robinet. Paris: Vrin. Cited by volume and page number.
Pölitz Religionsphilosophie Pölitz. Lectures on Religious Philosophy from 1780s
(in Ak. 28).
PNG Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Principles of Nature and Grace (in GP VI
598–606; in AG 206–213). Cited by section number.
Prol Prolegomena zu einer jeden künfigen Metaphysik, die als Wissenschaft
wird auftreten können (in Ak. 4). Prolegomena to Any Future
Metaphysics that Will Be Able to Come Forward as a Science. In
Theoretical Philosophy after 1781. Ed. Henry Allison and Peter Heath.
Trans. Gary Hatfield. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002,
pp. 49–169.
R Reflexionen (Ak. 15–19). Immanuel Kant, Notes and Fragments. Ed.
Paul Guyer. Trans. Curtis Bowman, Paul Guyer, and Frederick
Rauscher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
xii List of Abbreviations
RB Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. 1996. New Essays on Human Understanding.

Ed. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. Cited by page numbers, which correspond to the
Akademie edition in A VI 6.
Rel Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft (1794) (in Ak. 6).
Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, and
Other Writings. Ed. Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
ÜE Über eine Entdeckung, nach der alle neue Kritik der reinen Vernunft
durch eine ältere entbehrlich gemacht warden soll (in Ak. 8). “On a
Discovery Whereby Any New Critique of Pure Reason Is to Be Made
Superfluous by an Older One.” In Theoretical Philosophy after 1781.
Ed. Henry Allison and Peter Heath. Trans. Henry Allison. Cambridge:
V-Lo/Busolt Logik Busolt (Ak. 24).
V-Lo/Dohna Logik Dohna (Ak. 24). “The Dohna-Wundlacken Logic.” In: Immanuel
Kant, Lectures on Logic. Ed. and trans. Michael Young. Cambridge:
V-Lo/Pölitz Logik Pölitz (Ak. 24).
V-Lo/Wiener Wiener Logik (Ak. 24). “The Vienna Logic.” In: Immanuel Kant,
Lectures on Logic. Ed. and trans. Michael Young. Cambridge:
V-
Met/Dohna Metaphysik Dohna (Ak. 28). “Metaphysik Dohna.” In: Immanuel
Kant, Lectures on Metaphysics Ed. Karl Ameriks and Steve Naragon.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 355–391.
V-Met-L1 Metaphysik L1. (Ak. 28). “Metaphysik L1.” In: Immanuel Kant, Lectures
on Metaphysics Ed. Karl Ameriks and Steve Naragon. Cambridge:
V-Met-L2/Pölitz Metaphysik L2. (Ak. 28). “Metaphysik L2.” In: Immanuel Kant, Lectures
on Metaphysics Ed. Karl Ameriks and Steve Naragon. Cambridge:
V-
Met-
Vron Metaphysik Mrongovius. (Ak. 29). “Metaphysik Mrongovius.” In:
Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Metaphysics Ed. Karl Ameriks and Steve
Naragon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 109–288.
V-Th/Baumbach Danziger Rationaltheologie nach Baumbach (Ak. 28).
WF Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. 1998. Philosophical Texts. Ed. Roger
S. Woolhouse and Robert Francks. New York: Oxford University Press.
List of Contributors
Martha Brandt Bolton (Rutgers University)
Andrew Chignell (Princeton University)
Paul Guyer (Brown University)
Des Hogan (Princeton University)
Anja Jauernig (New York University)
Patrick Kain (Purdue University)
Alison Laywine (McGill University)
Brandon C. Look (University of Kentucky)
Donald Rutherford (University of California, San Diego)
Nicholas F. Stang (University of Toronto)
Eric Watkins (University of California, San Diego)

1
Kant’s Leibniz
A Historical and Philosophical Study
Brandon C. Look (University of Kentucky)*1
1 Introduction
The essays in this volume concern the relation between the philosophers Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), the two giants of
eighteenth-century German philosophy. While Kant refers often to Leibniz in his
writings, sometimes praising him but more often criticizing him, it is nevertheless
difficult for the historian of philosophy to know how well Kant understood
Leibniz and what Kant actually understood under the name “Leibniz.” What
could Kant have known, after all? What were the texts available to him? What
works do we know that he read and studied? What shaped his picture of Leibniz’s
thought? These questions are certainly not of merely antiquarian interest either,
for if it can be shown that Kant did not know Leibniz’s philosophy well, then his
claims of victory over his silent opponent might need to be moderated. Even if
Kant’s general criticism of Leibniz should be valid, even if he understood the
historical Leibniz in sufficient detail, it is still important to understand what
Leibnizian theses were at issue in Kant’s critique of dogmatic metaphysics.
In attempting to understand the Rezeptionsgeschichte of Leibniz’s philosophy in
the eighteenth century and, in particular, how Kant could have seen Leibniz, the
following facts should be borne in mind. First, Leibniz never wrote a magnum
opus comparable to Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy, Spinoza’s Ethics,
or Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding that could serve to express his
considered thought. Thus, the philosophical and historical position that Spinoza
and Locke were in with respect to Descartes or that Hume was in with respect to
Malebranche, Locke, and Berkeley differs vastly from the position of Kant vis-à-
vis Leibniz. Moreover, the typical form of Leibniz’s philosophical expression dif-
fered from that of his great early modern counterparts. With the exception of his
Theodicy and book-length commentary on Locke’s Essay, Leibniz’s philosophical
writings tended to be short, occasional essays, letters, and private notes and
* Thanks to Ursula Goldenbaum and to the members of the Early Modern History Workshop at
the Institute for Advanced Study, who read an earlier draft of this chapter and gave valuable feedback.
Brandon C. Look, Kant’s Leibniz: A Historical and Philosophical Study. In: Leibniz and Kant. Edited by Brandon C. Look,
Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199606368.003.0001
2 Kant’s Leibniz: Historical and Philosophical Study
memoranda. Yet, of Leibniz’s essays, only a relatively small number were published
during his lifetime. And while there was a small cottage industry of publishing
Leibniz’s works posthumously in the eighteenth century, it is actually surprising
how few new works appeared in the first five decades after Leibniz’s death in
1716. It was not until the great editions of Raspe (Leibniz 1765) and Dutens
(Leibniz 1768) that the philosophical public had anything approaching a
detailed picture of the depth and breadth of Leibniz’s work. And many of
Leibniz’s reflections on the nature of logic and even metaphysics were not pub-
lished until well into the nineteenth century. Unsurprisingly, historians of phil
osophy from the mid- 1800s on have been in a much better position to
understand Leibniz’s philosophy in all its variety and complexity than Kant ever
could have done. Further, much of Leibniz’s thought was filtered through the
writings of others—most notably, Christian Wolff and his disciples—and, to
some degree, altered in the process.
One might add to this list of facts about the history of the reception of Leibniz’s
philosophy that Kant was not always terribly concerned about the details of the
history of philosophy. In fact, he had a rather negative view of those more
interested in studying the texts of others than in thinking through a philosophical
problem for themselves. As he remarks in the preface to the Prolegomena to Any
Future Metaphysics (1783), “There are scholars for whom the history of philosophy
(ancient as well as modern) is itself their philosophy; the present prolegomena
have not been written for them. They must wait until those who endeavor to draw
from the wellsprings of reason itself have finished their business, and then it will
be their turn to bring news of these events to the world” (Ak. 4:255/Kant 2002,
53). In a similar spirit, and against an opponent, Eberhard, whom Kant sees as far
more devoted to the “truths” uttered by another philosopher, Leibniz, he writes,
“what is philosophically correct neither can nor should be learned from Leibniz;
rather the touchstone, which lies equally to hand for one man as for another, is
common human reason, and there are no classical authors in philosophy” (Ak.
8:219 n./Kant 2002, 309). Kant lived this position too, for he took the thought of
his predecessors as positions against which to argue and was less concerned to
understand their views in all their historical and textual complexity.1 It would
seem unlikely, then, that Kant should hunt down various Leibnizian texts
published several generations earlier in order to work out the nuances of Leibniz’s
system. At the same time, this means that the Leibniz with whom Kant argues
may not exactly be the Leibniz who lived, thought, and wrote before him.
1 In his Early German Philosophy, Lewis White Beck claims that much of Kant’s information and
misinformation concerning the history of philosophy came from Brucker’s Historia critica philoso-
phiae [Critical History of Philosophy] (1742–1744) (Beck 1969, 277). For example, Kant falsely asserts
that, on Plato’s view, punishment would be unnecessary in the ideal state (A 317/B 373).
Brandon C. Look 3
2 Leibniz’s Philosophy: The Unfolding of a System
Leibniz had already been established as one of the great philosophers of Europe
by the middle of the eighteenth century. Writing in the Encyclopédie in the 1760s,
Denis Diderot effuses, “Perhaps never has a man read as much, studied as much,
meditated more, and written more than Leibniz . . . What he has composed on the
world, God, nature, and the soul is of the most sublime eloquence. If his ideas had
been expressed with the flair of Plato, the philosopher of Leipzig would cede
nothing to the philosopher of Athens” (1975, 7:709). While Diderot’s enthusiasm
for Leibniz is remarkable, what is more remarkable is that he marvels at the sheer
quantity of Leibniz’s writings when, in fact, only a small portion were even known
to him and his contemporaries. At present, the Leibniz-Archives in Hanover
contain over 200,000 manuscript pages, including over 15,000 letters to his more
than 1,000 correspondents and 50,000 distinct essays, sketches, and exposés. Had
Diderot known this he might really have followed up on his lament elsewhere:
“when one compares the paltry talents one has been given with those of a Leibniz,
one is tempted to throw away one’s books and go die quietly in the dark of some
forgotten corner” (1975, 7:678). Thankfully he was ignorant of Leibniz’s enormous
philosophical output. Whether we should be thankful that others in the eighteenth
century were ignorant of so many of Leibniz’s works is another matter.
Although Leibniz published several early works in philosophy from his student
days—Metaphysical Disputation on the Principle of Individuation (1663) and
Dissertation on the Combinatorial Art (1666)—and in natural philosophy prior to
his Paris sojourn of 1672–1676—New Physical Hypothesis (1671) and Theory of
Abstract Motion (1671)—his first mature philosophical publication was not until
November 1684, when the Acta Eruditorum printed his short piece Meditations
on Knowledge, Truth and Ideas just a month after his first statement of the calcu-
lus in the same journal.2 Almost ten years would pass before Leibniz published
another work in philosophy, even though he was working diligently on difficult
issues in logic and metaphysics, composing among, other things, the Discourse on
Metaphysics (1686), General Inquiries about the Analysis of Concepts and of Truths
(1686), and Primary Truths (1689)—none of which would become known to
philosophical readers until almost two centuries later. When Leibniz began to
make his metaphysical views known to the public in the 1690s, he was already
celebrated as one of the most important mathematicians and physicists of his day,
having published further on differential and integral calculus as well as articles
critical of Cartesian and Newtonian physics. His notion of force, in particular,
became one of the crucial aspects of his new metaphysics, first announced in the
1694 essay On the Correction of First Philosophy and the Notion of Substance again
2 Titles of well-known works by Leibniz, Kant, and other canonical authors are given in English;
titles of other works are given in the original language with English translation in brackets.
published in the Leipzig Acta Eruditorum. But it was not until Leibniz presented
his theory of pre-established harmony in the New System of Nature and of the
Communication of Substances, as well as the Union of Mind and Body the following
year in the Parisian Journal des Sçavans that he became recognized as a
metaphysician of the first order. This essay occasioned a lively debate about
mind–body causation throughout the republic of letters, and Leibniz went to
considerable pains to respond to his various critics in different journals. Three
years later Leibniz published On Nature Itself, again in the Acta Eruditorum, in
which the philosophical public first encountered in connection with Leibniz’s
thought the term “monad.”
The beginning of the eighteenth century saw Leibniz engaged in the project of
critically responding to Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding which,
though first published in 1690, was not studied in detail by Leibniz until Pierre
Coste’s French translation in 1700. When Locke died in 1704, however, Leibniz
withheld publication of this, his most detailed work in epistemology, and it
remained unknown until 1765, when Rudolf Erich Raspe printed it with a
selection of other works that he had discovered while working at the Royal
Library of Hanover. At the urging of Queen Sophie Charlotte of Prussia, Leibniz
turned to natural religion and the classic problem of evil, which had been given
new life by the writings of Pierre Bayle, and composed his Theodicy, published in
Amsterdam in 1710. While in Vienna in 1714, Leibniz decided to write two short
treatises that would present his metaphysics in a condensed form and thus make
his views accessible to a wider audience. The first, the Principles of Nature and
Grace, was sent to both Prince Eugene of Savoy, then in Vienna, and Nicolas
Remond in Paris. The other treatise, the text that we have come to call the
Monadology (a title that Leibniz never used), expands upon some issues in the
Principles of Nature and Grace and the Theodicy. In his final years, Leibniz also
engaged in his important correspondence with Clarke. Even on the continent,
there was a tremendous interest in the so-called priority dispute between Leibniz
and Newton, and it was clear that, in disputing with Samuel Clarke, Leibniz was
really engaged in a kind of proxy war with Newton. Moreover, as was common in
the day, Leibniz wrote his letters to Clarke with an eye to their eventual
publication. While somewhat limited in their scope, these do in fact represent a
fairly sophisticated presentation of some of Leibniz’s views.
One of the crucial difficulties for anyone trying to understand Leibniz’s views is
that he wrote differently for different audiences. And what he intended for a
general audience is, unsurprisingly, not as straightforward as what he wrote to his
philosophical correspondents or for himself. Thus, in a passage from a letter to
Placcius in 1696, famous to all Leibniz scholars, he writes, “he who knows me
only from my published works does not know me” (D VI 1, 65). And in a similar
vein to Jacob Bernoulli one year later, Leibniz says, “I have written countless
things on countless subjects; but I have published only a few things on a few
subjects” (GM III 61). The situation changes somewhat in the last decades of his
Brandon C. Look 5
life—but only somewhat. Leibniz claims in a letter to Nicolas Remond that “It is
true that my Theodicy does not suffice to present my system as a whole. But if it is
joined with what I have published in various learned journals, those of Leipzig,
Paris, and those of Mr. Bayle and Mr. Basnage, it will not fall far short of doing so,
at least for the principles” (GP III 618). But we should note that Leibniz’s claim is
that this is enough to get the attentive reader the basic principles of his
philosophy—hardly the deep foundations of the system. For example, many of
Leibniz’s metaphysical theses are closely connected to logical theses and theses
about the nature of the infinite, and his thoughts about these topics were largely
unknown until well into the nineteenth century. In fact, Leibniz is simply
reluctant to share some of his views; as he writes to Des Bosses:
I do not think those things we have discussed in letters concerning philosophical

matters are suited for communication in any sort of public way, for they are
unorganized and not gathered together in a system, such as I was hoping for
from you. I have written these things for you, namely for the wise, not for any
one at all; thus, they are hardly appropriate for the Memoires de Trevoux, which
is intended more for a popular audience. I hope that you, by virtue of your
goodwill toward me, would not allow them to appear in such an unsuitable
place. [LDB 83]
Leibniz’s reluctance to publish his more daring and difficult philosophy has
invited cynicism and skepticism over the years. Bertrand Russell, for example,
famously remarked that Leibniz’s published work “was optimistic, orthodox, fantas-
tic, and shallow; [his unpublished work], which has been slowly unearthed from his
manuscripts by fairly recent editors, was profound, coherent, largely Spinozistic,
and amazingly logical” (1945, 581). The cynicism, on the part of Russell, is that
Leibniz purposefully withheld his deeper and more dangerous philosophy and pub-
lished his orthodox views in order to curry favor with the rich and powerful. That is
going too far. But Russell is right that the works published and intended for a wider
public are conciliatory in tone and content and that what is often most interesting
in Leibniz’s thought is to be found in material that came to light long after his death.
Ernst Cassirer indirectly suggests that we should be wary of claims of eighteenth-
century scholars with respect to their knowledge of Leibniz’s philosophy, for they
simply could not know Leibniz’s esoteric metaphysics (1998, 34).3 For example,
Leibniz’s important correspondence with Des Bosses, which deepens our under-
standing of so much of Leibniz’s metaphysics, only started to become widely
available to scholars and philosophers in Dutens’s edition of 1768; and, while
3 The distinction between an exoteric and esoteric Leibniz can be seen even in the late eighteenth
century, with Johann August Eberhard’s Neue Apologie des Sokrates [New Apology for Socrates]
(Eberhard 1787) and the critical response of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Leibniz von den ewigen
Straften [Leibniz on Eternal Punishment] (Lessing 1886, 11:461–487). See also Wilson (1995, 460–462).
I shall discuss this issue in some more detail in §4 of this chapter.
some important letters trickled out in the mid-eighteenth century, Leibniz’s

correspondences with Arnauld and De Volder only became known in the nineteenth
century through the editions of Grotefend and Gerhardt. Likewise, Leibniz’s tre-
mendously important and complex writings on logic and language from the
1680s, which seem to fill the three-part volume 4 of the Akademie’s edition of
Leibniz’s philosophical writings, only began to be published at the turn of the
twentieth century in Couturat’s collection of texts.
In the years following his death, Leibniz’s works were slowly published, but not
enough and not fast enough to mitigate the judgment of Russell and Cassirer.
Aside from the Theodicy, the best- known texts of Leibniz’s philosophy in
eighteenth- century Germany were certainly the Specimen Dynamicum, the
Monadology, and the correspondence with Samuel Clarke. While little hangs on
the matter of translation, it is of some interest that the text of the Monadology was
never published in its original French until Erdmann’s Leibnitii opera philosopica
[Leibniz’s Philosophical Works] of 1840. Instead, it was published in 1720 in a
German translation by Heinrich Köhler as Lehrsätze über die Monadologie
[Theorems on the Monadology]4 and in a Latin translation by Michael Gottlieb
Hansch in 1721 in the Acta Eruditorum as Principia Philosophiae, Autore
G.G. Leibnitio [Leibniz’s Principles of Philosophy].5 Moreover, the Principles of
Nature and Grace was published in France in 1718 and then in German transla-
tion along with Gottsched’s German translation of the Theodicy in 1744. Likewise,
the correspondence between Leibniz and Clarke was published by Clarke in 1717
and translated into German by Köhler in 1740. And it was not until Raspe’s edi-
tion of the New Essays in 1765 and Dutens’s Leibnitii opera omnia [The Collected
Works of Leibniz] of 1768 that scholars and philosophers had a significant trove of
Leibnizian texts to draw a more sophisticated interpretation of Leibniz’s views. By
that time, however, a certain picture had already been drawn. As Cassirer puts it,
“The influence of Leibniz’s thoughts is therefore indirect: they are efficacious only
in the reformulation [Umbildung] that they underwent in the system of Wolff ”
(1998, 34). Interestingly, a more refined and subtle account of Leibniz’s philoso
phy then began to be seen as a reaction to Kant’s philosophy and other develop-
ments in the last decades of the eighteenth century through writings of Jacobi,
Eberhard, Maaß, and Herder.6
3 The Origins of the “Leibniz-Wolffian Philosophy”
Leibniz’s final years were certainly difficult. His health was failing; he was
embroiled in the bitter priority dispute with Newton and his partisans over the
4 See Leibniz (1720). 5 See Lamarra et al. (2001).

6 My thanks to a referee for suggesting this point.
Brandon C. Look 7
discovery of the calculus; and, when his employer, Duke and Elector Georg
Ludwig of Hanover, became King George I of Great Britain and Ireland in 1714,
he was told that his services were not required in London. At the same time, a
young philosopher, whom Leibniz had personally helped to secure a professorship
at the University of Halle, was gaining ascendance: Christian Wolff (1679–1754).
From a distance of three centuries, Wolff ’s fate now seems quite remarkable.
No philosopher was as dominant on the philosophical scene in Germany in the
first half of the eighteenth century. Johann Christian Edelmann has the simpleton
character in his controversial Moses mit aufgedeckten Angesichte [The Revealed
Face of Moses] complain of a “veritable lycanthropy” among the educated public—
everyone was becoming a wolf.7 By many, Wolff was even considered dangerous.8
Yet, in what is still the standard history of pre-Kantian German philosophy in
English, Lewis White Beck offers the following picture of Wolff and his works:
[Wolff] illustrates what needs no illustration. He proves (though often by proofs

so invalid that the fastidious reader may squirm) what needs no proof and what
admits of no proof. He defines what needs no definition. He cites, by elaborate
cross-references, his other works, which all too often are found not to elucidate
the passage in question but to be almost equivalent to it. He recommends his
other books. He boasts of what he has accomplished. He moves with glacial
celerity. He ruthlessly bores. [1969, 258]
To complain that Wolff ’s books are boring is, however, to ignore their purpose:
these works are first and foremost textbooks with a definite pedagogical goal; they
are not the freestanding philosophical essays or books written for other
philosophers. Moreover, Beck’s extremely negative judgment should not blind us
to what the situation was surely like in the German academic milieu in the early
part of the century. For example, in the first decades of the eighteenth century at
the University of Königsberg there was relative diversity in the curriculum, with
the philosophy of the moderns, specifically Cartesianism, and Aristotelian
philosophy both on offer. Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700–1766) tells us that
in his first years at the university he read Descartes, Locke, Christian Thomasius,
Samuel Pufendorf, Jean Le Clerc, and others as well. But, in the end, he felt at
sea—that is, until he came upon Leibniz’s Theodicy and the metaphysics of Wolff:
“Then it seemed to me like one who, from a wild sea of competing opinions,
entered a safe harbor and, after the topsy-turvy, came again to stand on solid
7 See Edelmann (1740 III 108), facsimile edition republished in Edelmann (1969, vol. 7.1).
8 As we shall see, the Pietists of Halle successfully campaigned to have him exiled from
Brandenburg-Prussia. And over forty years later, Leonhard Euler claimed in his Letters to a German
Princess that “les monadistes sont des gens bien dangereux,” by which he clearly meant Wolff and his
followers (Euler 2003, 266 = Letter 132).
ground. I found here that certainty that I had earlier sought all over in vain.”9
Wolff ’s popularity and importance rested precisely in the systematicity of his
presentation; that is, in the application of the mathematical method in philoso
phy, something that was unusual in the universities of Central Europe.10 At the
same time, the resulting philosophical books bore a superficial resemblance to
the philosophical textbooks of Scholasticism they were replacing. Despite the
troubles that Wolff would eventually have in Halle with conservative Pietist
thinkers, his works in metaphysics, ethics, law, and natural theology came to be
taught throughout Central Europe and Scandinavia in both Catholic and
Protestant lands. Moreover, his textbooks in mathematics were of tremendous
importance for most of the century. Indeed, even Kant used the Elementa mathe-
seos universae [Elements of Universal Mathematics] for his own lectures in math
ematics and natural philosophy.
Wolff adopted many of Leibniz’s theses, advocating the doctrine of pre-
established harmony, asserting the importance of the Principles of Contradiction
and Sufficient Reason, and arguing that metaphysics could be expressed in a
mathematical or geometrical manner.11 And the proximity of their views in some
regards led to their assimilation in the mind of the philosophical public. This fact,
combined with the prominence of Wolff and his students, also had the effect of
essentially drowning out Leibniz’s original voice. As Giorgio Tonelli once remarked,
the works of Wolff and his students in Germany “crushingly outnumbered” the
works of Leibniz (1974, 444). Indeed, from the time of Wolff ’s troubles in Halle, a
common story arose, repeated by both sympathizers and opponents alike: that
Wolff essentially systematized Leibniz’s philosophy. Gottsched, for example,
claimed that Wolff only expressed more clearly what Leibniz had already said:
One would err terribly if, after reading through the writings of both of them,
one did not find that Leibniz and his follower had the same system in mind—
though expressed in different ways. The former presented it piecemeal and in
an exoteric way . . . The latter, however, presented everything systematically,
coherently and esoterically, with many gaps filled, and countless truths added,
which could be deduced as valid consequences of what went before.12
And Gottsched’s distinguished wife, Victoria, wrote the following verse to the
Marquise du Châtelet in 1742: “what half the world from Leibniz came to know,/
9 Gottsched (1733–1734, 1: preface n.p.) also quoted in Wundt (1945, 121).

10 This is a point that Ursula Goldenbaum makes nicely in Chapter 2 of this volume.
11 To this end, Wolff (and Baumgarten) presented arguments that purported to demonstrate the
Principle of Sufficient Reason. See Look (2011b).
12 Quoted in Döring (1999, 62–63), Preface to the 3rd volume of the translation of Bayle’s
Dictionary.
Brandon C. Look 9
our great man Wolff did better still winnow.”13 Writing to Meiran in 1741,
Voltaire, whose sympathies were always with Newton, Locke and other empiricist
philosophers, runs the thought of Leibniz together with Wolff, damning both:
Frankly, Leibniz just came to muddle the sciences. His insufficient reason, his
continuity, his plenum, his monads, etc. are the seeds [germes] of confusion
from which M. Volf [Wolff] has methodically drawn [a fait éclore méthodique-
ment] 15 quarto volumes, which will more than ever give German minds the
taste for reading much and understanding little.14
By the end of the century, the close relation between Leibniz and Wolff had
become standard. As the Baron von Eberstein put it:
Leibniz’s excellent thoughts were still little used, and they were just scattered
throughout his writings, not formed into a cohesive whole and brought together
with other truths. In short, other than in Leibniz’s mind, there did not exist a
metaphysics. But the builder of a system worthy of the name was Christian
Wolff. [Eberstein 1794, 1:123]
The story became official when Hegel presented his lectures on the history of
philosophy and wrote, “On the whole Wolff ’s Philosophy is in its core Leibniz’s
philosophy, except that he systematized it” (1971, 20:259).
Kant himself, on numerous occasions, likewise spoke of a close family
resemblance between the philosophy of Leibniz and the philosophy of Wolff. For
example, in the opening of his polemic against Johann August Eberhard, who had
claimed that the Critique of Pure Reason contained nothing that could not already
be found in the writings of Leibniz, Kant countered, “How it came to pass that
these things were not long ago already seen in the great man’s philosophy and in
its daughter, the Wolffian, he does not, to be sure, explain” (Ak. 8:187/Kant 2002,
283). But Kant was aware of some important differences. His account of the
Leibnizian monadology, for example, in the “Amphiboly” chapter of the Critique
13 “Und was die halbe Welt vom Leibnitz neu gelernet,/Hat unser großer Wolf noch besser aus-
gekörnet” (Gottsched 1763, 122).
14 Quoted in Cassirer (1998, 35); see original citation to Meiran 5 Mai 1741 (Voltaire 1820–1822,
58:119). Cf. his letter to Maupertuis, August 10, 1741 (ibid., 150–152). “That man [Wolff] brings back
to Germany all the horrors of scholasticism overloaded with sufficient reasons, monads, indiscernibles
and all the scientific absurdities that Leibniz brought into the world out of vanity and that the
Germans study because they are Germans.” Voltaire’s friend and lover, the Marquise du Châtelet, also
saw Wolff as following Leibniz, but she clearly had a much higher opinion of Leibniz than did
Voltaire—advocating essentially a Leibnizian explanation of living forces rather than the solution
offered by British and continental Newtonians. See Châtelet (1740, 12–14 and chs. 20 and 21). Voltaire
and Châtelet eventually separated, having irreconcilable differences over Leibniz, Wolff, and presum-
ably other matters.
of Pure Reason shows that he was careful not to conflate the two monadologies.15
Nevertheless, Kant did group Leibniz and Wolff together in crucial respects. He
did not employ the term “rationalist”; in fact, the term “rationalist” and its cog-
nates are rarely used by Kant.16 Rather, Leibniz and Wolff were both guilty of
engaging in “dogmatic metaphysics,” by which Kant meant attempting to make
claims about the supersensible without having first engaged in a critique of the
powers of the human intellect. And the contrast that Kant draws throughout his
Critical writings, the opposing schools that his philosophical system is designed
to resolve, is between “dogmatism” and “empiricism.”
The term “Leibniz-Wolffian Philosophy” was commonplace in the century,
thus solidifying the connection between the two thinkers. For his part, however,
Wolff was uncomfortable with it and in his autobiography charged his own
student, Georg Bernhard Bilfinger (1693–1750), with creating it (Wolff 1841,
142). But this is certainly not true. Bilfinger did discuss the commonality between
Wolff and Leibniz on the issue of pre-established harmony in his early works, but
he also recognized differences between the two thinkers in a score of other
areas.17 It is much more likely that the term derived from Wolff ’s opponents:
Joachim Lange, Franz Budde, and Andreas Rüdiger.18 Whether or not Wolff ’s
philosophy should be seen as the systematization of Leibniz’s philosophy, it is
indisputable that anti-Wolffians correctly saw similarities between Leibniz and
Wolff on the crucial matters of faith and freedom.
What first drew the ire of Pietist thinkers in Halle were Wolff ’s lectures on the
natural religion of the Chinese, in which he argued that Chinese culture proved
that it was possible to lead moral lives without a revealed religion.19 Such a view,
then as now, was greatly disturbing to conservative religious thinkers, and the
Halle Pietists argued that the philosophy of Wolff was opposed to Christian
orthodoxy. Wolff tried to defend his view from such charge, but to little avail.20 To
some degree, however, Wolff was merely continuing along the path that Leibniz
had already established several decades earlier.21 For Leibniz played an important
role in creating an interest in Chinese culture and the interaction between Jesuit
15 See Rutherford (2004, 215f.).

16 The Paralogisms of Pure Reason is directed against theses in the “rational psychology” of Wolff
and Baumgarten—theses that Leibniz, too, endorsed.
17 See Bilfinger (1723), Bilfinger (1741), and Wundt (1945, 150 n.).
18 See Wundt (1945, 150 n.). See also Ludovici (1737 vol. 1, §136). That a group should be labeled
by its opponents is, of course, all too common. The Pietists themselves owed their sobriquet to their
opponents at the end of the seventeenth century (Hinrichs 1971, 1).
19 An excellent modern edition with a very helpful introduction can be found in Wolff (1985).
20 Wolff claimed, for example, in lectures and in his Theologia naturalis that there was no conflict
between reason and revealed religion. But Joachim Lange took great pains to argue the contrary pos
ition before his theology students (Hartmann 1737, 385–387).
21 It is not clear that Wolff ever read Leibniz’s Novissima Sinica, however; instead, it is likely that his
interest in Chinese philosophy was piqued by the publication in 1711 of translations of six classical
Chinese philosophical texts by the Jesuit François Noël (Noël 1711). See Wolff (1985, xxi ff.).
Brandon C. Look 11
missionaries and the Chinese people, publishing in 1697 the Novissima Sinica
[The Latest on China], which concerned the Chinese rites controversy. His
reflections on the nature of the Chinese religion led him to argue that Chinese
culture demonstrated the independence of morality from the teachings of revealed
religion. Put differently, Leibniz held that the practical moral dictates of
Confucianism were identical to the practical dictates of Christianity.22 In the
Theodicy, he also explicitly took up the issue of the relation between faith and
reason, arguing that reason can never conflict with the word of the Bible when
properly understood. Pietist thinkers, however, saw the issue differently and
regarded Wolff ’s lectures as an affront to the Christian religion and the moral order.
The more interesting philosophical issues concerned the scope of the principle
of sufficient reason, freedom, and determinism and the relation between mind
and body. And this philosophical problem-complex certainly played as great a
role in animating the dispute between Pietists and Wolffians.23 The Pietists
demanded that the soul freely exercise causal influence on the body, and they saw
the doctrine of pre- established harmony as inconsistent with any kind of
orthodox libertarian doctrine. Indeed, in his writings against Wolff, Lange put
Leibniz, Wolff, and Spinoza in the same camp and argued that all three philosophers
embraced a kind of fatalism or necessitarianism (Lange 1723, 65–66).24 Spinoza,
of course, would happily have accepted this claim. Leibniz, however, developed a
rather involved metaphysical system that allowed him to endorse a kind of com-
patibilism; yet much of the philosophical underpinning of this more complex
defense was unknown in this period. For example, no philosophers of the eight-
eenth century could have been familiar with the kind of reasoning that Leibniz
employed in his correspondence with Arnauld or in the Discourse on Metaphysics
which appealed to a “complete individual concept” for each substance.25 Wolff,
for his part, rejected any hint of Spinozism, affirming that the world came about
through an act of divine will; he further sought to argue that the doctrine of pre-
established harmony (with substance dualism) was the best defense against the
kind Spinozistic fatalism the Pietists so feared, for the soul always acted according
to its own laws.26
22 For more on this issue see Li and Poser (2000), Riley (1999), and Leibniz (1994).
23 See Watkins (1998) and Goldenbaum in Chapter 2 of this volume.
24 But as Wundt has remarked, while Lange railed against Leibniz’s system in his Modesta disquisi-
tio, he cited almost exclusively the work of Wolff as evidence of Leibniz’s pernicious doctrine (Wundt
1945, 150 n.).
25 In the Theodicy, Leibniz did present an account of freedom, according to which an agent is free if
and only if the contrary of a particular action does not entail a contradiction (that is, if and only if
there is another possible world in which the agent (or likeness) does otherwise). See the final sections,
§§410ff., in which Leibniz discusses the different Sextuses in different possible worlds. This view is
directly related to Leibniz’s earlier view, but the logical conception of substance is notably absent in
this popular work.
26 See Wolff (1737a II:3); Wolff (1737b, 14–17).
Despite the common narrative about the “Leibniz-Wolffian philosophy,” the

differences between the two thinkers on a number of issues were known to many
in the eighteenth century, at least to those who cared to look. Wolff highlighted
many of these differences himself, and other scholars at the time were keen to
point out these differences as well.27 Ludovici, for example, who attempted to
write one of the first histories of Leibniz’s philosophy, Ausführlicher Entwurff
einer vollständigen Historie der Leibnitzischen Philosophie [Detailed Outline of a
Complete History of the Leibnizian Philosophy], urged readers to distinguish
between Wolff and Leibniz: “one will find the true philosophical system
[Lehrgebäude] of Leibniz not at all in the writings of Wolff, or at least only in
pieces and very imperfectly expressed.”28 And as Formey put it in his Histoire
Abrégée de la Philosophie, Wolff “profited from the ideas of Leibniz; but he did not
completely follow them, and he put many of his own thoughts into his system.”29
It might serve to give a concrete example of the way in which Leibniz’s mature
philosophical views were obscured from the view of the philosophically minded
reading public by Wolff and his followers. While it is by no means a settled issue
in Leibniz scholarship, it is fair to say that, according to the standard interpret
ation, Leibniz was an idealist.30 That is, he believed that the world was grounded
in the mind, or that the mental or the formal was alone fully real. As he expressed
it in a letter to Burcher De Volder in 1704, “considering the matter carefully, we
must say that there is nothing in things but simple substances, and in them, per-
ception and appetite” (G II 270, AG 181). In other words, only simple substances,
or minds, truly exist; bodies are phenomena, though they are grounded in the
simple substances. The simple substances are themselves unities endowed with
forces, which in turn can be understood in terms of representational activity and
their capacity to express or mirror the entire world from a unique point of view.
For Leibniz, however, not all representative or expressive states are conscious sen-
sations; indeed, individual substances simply express the world, though often,
even mostly, unconsciously. While Wolff also claimed that the ultimate constitu-
ents of the world were simple substances or monads, it is clear that his monads
did not have the mental, dynamic, or representational features that Leibniz’s did;
he denied the thorough-going and universal mirroring of simple substances,
down to the least petite perception, and in so doing rejected Leibniz’s monadology
and a more sophisticated version of pre-established harmony.31 In the end, Wolff ’s
27 The differences between Wolff and Leibniz are very important to bear in mind in trying to
understand the reception of Leibniz and the history of Leibnizianism in the eighteenth century. This
issue has been discussed by many scholars of the period—e.g. Tonelli (1963, 1966, 1974, 1987); Beck
(1969, 1993); Wundt (1924, 1945); École (1979, 1998) and, more recently, by Jauernig (2008, 2011).
See also Goldenbaum (2004, 27–28).
28 Ludovici (1737 II 427). 29 Formey (1760, 297).
30 The literature on this subject is extensive. I present an introduction to the debate and defense
and interpretation of a kind of Leibnizian idealism in Look (2010).
31 See e.g. Wolff (1737c, §243 and 1720, §§598ff.). See also Erdmann (1876, 63).
Brandon C. Look 13
simple substances were not so much metaphysical points as they were physical
monads, the least ingredients in material beings. And there was thus a great deal
of truth in his comment to his benefactor Ernst Christoph von Manteuffel that
Leibniz’s system of monads “begins where mine ends” (Wolff 1841, 82).
Wolff and his students, however, largely prevented the Leibnizian monadology
from being interpreted in what we might now think of as an idealistic manner. In
his Dilucidationes philosphicae [Philosophical Explanations] (1725), Bilfinger
defined idealism as the thesis that there is an infinite spirit and that finite spirits
are dependent upon it, but that nothing else exists beside spirit. Further, for
Bilfinger, spirits are simple beings endowed with intellect and will; they are
immortal and capable of reward and punishment. Bodies, on the other hand,
have no real existence outside of us; they are simply thought by us to have real
existence because they are represented as existing outside of us and because these
representations follow a constant order (§115). Now, according to Bilfinger,
Leibniz did not advocate idealism for two obvious reasons. First, while Leibniz’s
simple substances are endowed with perception, they are not all endowed with
intellect and will, because intellect and will require distinct cognition (§110).
Thus, for Leibniz, it is false that all beings are spirits—even if all simples are
essentially mind-like. Second, Bilfinger claims that idealism entails the view that
there is nothing real and independent to which our mental representations
correspond. But since Leibniz’s view is that each mind represents other monads—
that is, other real existents, albeit confusedly and as bodies—it is nevertheless the
case that Leibniz’s representations correspond to something real. But it should be
clear from this account that one could be both an idealist in our sense and a non-
idealist in Bilfinger’s sense—as, I would argue, Leibniz in fact was. That is, one
could claim that the ultimate beings are mind-like, incorporeal beings, endowed
with representations, while also holding that representations do correspond to
things independent of a perceiving mind. Indeed, on my view, the correct
interpretation of Leibniz’s metaphysics—from 1679 on—is one in which minds or
the mental or the formal ground all other beings.32 Wolff also argued that Leibniz
was not an idealist—though he did so perhaps for self-serving reasons. For Wolff,
dogmatic thinkers can be classified either as monists or dualists, the former in
turn either as idealists as materialists (which is what Leibniz said as well). But,
insofar as Leibniz’s theory of pre-established harmony requires that bodies be
recognized as real and distinct from minds, then Leibniz must be a kind of dual-
ist.33 As has been pointed out already, Wolff himself disliked the expression
“Leibniz-Wolffian philosophy,” and he correctly saw that the crucial aspect of
32 I argue for this view in detail in Look (2010 and 2017).

33 See the Preface to the Vernünftige Gedanken von Gott, der Welt, der Seele des Menschen, auch
allen Dingen überhaupt (usually called the German Metaphysics) (that is, Wolff [1720]). Of course,
neither Bilfinger nor Wolff had the texts that make the arguments most forcefully for Leibnizian ideal-
ism (in our sense of the term), e.g. the correspondences with De Volder and Des Bosses.
Leibniz’s system was the monadology, which, to the extent that he understood its
idealistic underpinnings, he rejected.34 At the same time, however, Wolff did
advocate the system of pre-established harmony as a solution to the problem of
mind–body causation. Wolff ’s solution to this metaphysical dilemma was to de-
emphasize the idealistic tendencies in Leibniz’s thought, seeking to make Leibniz
into a dualist like himself.
Further, since he advocated a substance dualism of mind and body, Wolff was
left to endorse a system of pre-established harmony that resembled Leibniz’s
popular presentations of his own theory. And the same was true of his students.
For example, in his De harmonia animi et corporis humani, maxime praestabilita,
ex mente illustris Leibnitii, commentatio hypothetica [Hypothetical Commentary
on Leibniz’s Pre- established Harmony of the Soul and Human Body] (1723),
Bilfinger demonstrates a level of knowledge of the actual historical debate about
the doctrine that Wolff rarely showed himself, but he nevertheless cannot get
behind the Leibnizian façade. He gives an argument for the “metaphysical union”
of mind and body that Leibniz had claimed to exist in his discussion with Father
René-Joseph de Tournemine, and in doing so, offers a perfectly respectable
Leibnizian defense of pre-established harmony. For example, Bilfinger says the
following in a footnote to his discussion of Tournemine’s objection that the
“harmony” of mind and body can never constitute a real union:
It is impossible that a true physical relation or union exist between our soul and
body, unless the soul is also a body. The physical does not pertain to anything
but body. You say, what is physical? But whatever is common to soul and body is
itself metaphysical. Therefore, the union too, which is common to them, is
metaphysical. For metaphysics is just that which is goes beyond the spirit and
the body.35
Bilfinger’s explicit argument is that, for the mind and body to form a “real,
physical union,” the mind would have to be corporeal. Since it is not, the mind
and body can have at most a metaphysical relation between them. And the
relation is metaphysical, he claims, because it extends beyond the spiritual and
corporeal realms. If one takes the Leibnizian language of minds and bodies at face
value—as Tournemine, Wolff and Bilfinger all did—then this is as good a response
to Tournemine as one can give. What Bilfinger could not have known is that the
problem that Tournemine highlighted is one that Leibniz took quite seriously—
though only in its extension to the realm of monads. In a draft of a letter to Des
Bosses in 1706, just as his debate with Tournemine was going to press, Leibniz
34 See Rutherford (2004). Wolff was also no advocate of Leibnizian optimism as expressed in the
Theodicy.
35 Bilfinger (1741, 218), reprinted in GW III 21).
Brandon C. Look 15
writes, “The union I find some difficulty explaining is that which joins the different
simple substances or monads existing in our body with us, such that it makes one
thing from them” (LDB 23). But, as I have argued elsewhere, this is a problem that
plagues Leibniz for the last decade of his life.36
German philosophy in the first decades after Leibniz’s death became a partisan
affair. By 1736 there were 126 polemical attacks on the “Leibniz- Wolffian”
philosophy; Wolff countered with 14 separate defenses of his views, and his stu-
dents and followers contributed another 68 works.37 Whatever differences there
may have been between Leibniz and Wolff, they were clearly on the same side,
fought most vociferously by Pietist theologians and philosophers, who denied the
principle of sufficient reason, pre-established harmony, and the conformity of
faith and reason. This dispute between rationalists and Pietists is central to the
rest of the century in German intellectual life, and the later culture war between
Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment thinkers is in some ways presaged in
it.38 The philosophical landscape in Central Europe was also becoming even more
complex as the empiricism of Locke and scientific methodology of Newton were
making headway in Germany. Thus, Wolff and his supporters found themselves
fighting opponents on several different fields of battle.39 This complexity also
meant that Kant could eventually carve out a position as both an Enlightenment
philosopher and an opponent of Leibnizian and Wolffian rationalism.
4 The Philosophical Scene in Mid-century Germany
As a matter of institutional power, Wolff ’s philosophy predominated in most

German universities. Although Wolff ’s works were officially banned in
Brandenburg-Prussia from the time of his expulsion from Halle, they were widely
used throughout the rest of the German- speaking world. And his students
occupied positions at nearly all major universities. Moreover, by the 1730s
Frederick William I evidently had grown tired of the Pietist attacks on Wolff, for
he removed the ban on Wolff ’s philosophy and even tried to lure the most
prominent German philosopher back to his lands from the Landgraviate of
36 See Look (1999).

37 Hartmann (1737, 835ff.). Of these anti- Wolffian polemical attacks, many were by non-
philosophers, and they lacked a certain degree of philosophical sophistication. This sophistication will
come, however, in the works of Crusius and others in the next generation.
38 At the same time, insofar as Pietism was individualistic and anti-authoritarian, it can also be
seen as also contributing to demise of ancien régime Europe.
39 Christian Thomasius and his followers were also important in the eighteenth-century German
philosophical world. (See e.g. Beck [1969] and Hunter [2001]; Wundt [1945], on the other hand,
claims that Thomasius had relatively little impact on German philosophy until his ideas were taken up
by counter Enlightenment philosophers in the 1780s.) However, as their views are not directly relevant
to the way that Kant came to understand the philosophy of Leibniz, I shall ignore this strand of his-
tory here.
Hesse- Kassel, where Wolff had been for over a decade. Wolff refused the
invitations, citing his gratitude to the university in Marburg and the difficulties of
such a move, but upon the accession of Frederick II in 1740 Wolff was successfully
coaxed back to Halle to take up the chancellorship of his old university. By all
accounts (including Wolff ’s own), crowds greeted him like a hero upon his arrival
in the city.40
There then began what can best be thought of as a second wave of Wolffianism.
In many works of academic philosophy that would become central to Kant’s own
studies and teaching, Wolff ’s philosophy was spread and further developed. A
short list of such works will be familiar to any Kant scholar: Gottsched’s Erste
Gründe der gesamten Weltweisheit [Foundations of a Complete Philosophy] (1733);
Baumeister’s Institutiones philosophiae rationalis [Principles of Rational Philosophy]
(1735) and Institutiones metaphysicae [Metaphysical Principles] (1738);
Baumgarten’s Metaphysica (1739) and Aesthetica (1750); and Meier’s Vernunftlehre
[Doctrine of Reason] (1752). In these and other writings of the period Wolff ’s
influence is on clear display. Comparatively few academic philosophers used as a
springboard for further reflection the actual writings and thought of Leibniz.41
At the same time, some philosophers started to push back against this school,
advancing arguments far more thoughtful and interesting than those given by the
majority of Pietist polemicists. Certainly the deepest of these authors was
Christian August Crusius (1715–1775), whose Dissertatio de usu et limitibus prin-
cipii rationis determinatis, vulgo sufficientis [Dissertation on the Use and Limits
of the Principle of Determining Reason, Commonly known as the Principle of
Sufficient Reason] (1743) and Entwurf der nothwendigen Vernunftwahrheiten
wiefern sie den zufälligen entgegengesetzt werden [Outline of the Necessary Truths
of Reason, insofar as they are Opposed to Contingent Truths] (1745) among other
works opposed doctrines central to both Leibniz and Wolff and had a great
impact on the young Kant.42 Indeed, in several important respects Crusius laid
the groundwork for many of Kant’s central views, in asserting the fundamentality
40 Hinrichs (1971, 440); Wolff (1841, 167–170).

41 There are also, however, differences between these philosophers and Wolff, which are sometimes
important. In a fascinating article, École (1991) argues that many of Kant’s claims about Wolff ’s phil
osophy come from his reading of Baumgarten, Baumeister, and Gottsched and not directly from
Wolff ’s texts themselves; for when Kant misrepresents Wolff, it is usually in a manner and on a topic
that can be found in one of these other authors. As should be clear, I believe the same is sometimes
true of Kant’s claims about Leibniz’s philosophy. It should also be pointed out that, while his
Metaphysica was clearly written in the spirit of Wolffian philosophy, Baumgarten was not simply a
Wolffian rationalist. First, he actually presented views that were closer to Leibniz’s than Wolff ’s.
Second, he came from a strongly Pietist background and at the end of his life seemed to return to the
fold, claiming on his deathbed that only Christ comforted his soul and “neither the philosopher nor
the theologian could help, only faith alone.” “My old faith, with this I depart, is the demonstratio dem-
onstrationum . . . ” Mendelssohn saw this turn as a “misological death” and inexcusable. (Quoted in
Baumgarten [2011, xxviii–xxix].) I examine Baumgarten in more detail in Look (2018).
42 In Chapter 3 of this volume, Eric Watkins addresses the role of Crusius’s thought in Kant’s philo-
sophical development.
Brandon C. Look 17
and power of the will, in limiting the scope of the principle of sufficient reason,
and in defending a theory of real causal interaction between things.
While Wolffianism was generally dominant throughout Germany, the situation
in Königsberg was more complicated. The university had strong Pietist elements
from the turn of the century on, and even had an eclectic mix of Scholasticism
and modern philosophy as attested to by Gottsched as we saw above. While a
Wolffian professor, Christian Gabriel Fischer (1686–1751), was forced to leave the
university under Pietist pressure in 1725, less than a decade later the university
came to tolerate Wolff ’s philosophy (Erdmann 1876, 19). In fact, the Pietist
professor of theology, Georg Friedrich Rogall (1701–1733) required his own
students to pass the cursum philosophicum and, in so doing, ultimately encouraged
Wolffianism among the Pietists (Erdmann 1876, 21). On the other hand, the
philosophers in Königsberg, who in many ways stood close to Wolff, also sought
to correct and improve his philosophy. A clear case in point is Martin Knutzen,
Kant’s influential teacher, who offered one of the most important critiques of the
doctrine of pre-established harmony in his Systema causarum efficientium [System
of Efficient Causes] (1745) while at the same time remaining committed to central
tenets of Leibniz and Wolff. Given Knutzen’s commitment to Newton, his
philosophy was genuinely eclectic.
Universities were not the only prominent institutions for philosophy, science,
and the arts. Frederick II also decided to revive the Royal Academy of Sciences,
which had been in decline since Leibniz’s death under his less-than-intellectual
father, Frederick William I, the “Soldier King.”43 At the suggestion of Voltaire,
Frederick invited Pierre Louis Maupertuis (1698–1759), one of the most famous
natural philosophers of the day, to serve as President of the Academy. Frederick
then turned to a younger man to aid Maupertuis in the operation and development
of the Royal Academy, Leonhard Euler (1707–1783), who at 33 was already
known as the foremost mathematician on the continent. Both Maupertuis and
Euler were highly critical of Leibniz and Wolff, and they used the power of the
43 While a common story is that Frederick William I named his court fool to be Leibniz’s successor
as head of the Royal Academy, this is not exactly right. Jacob Paul von Gundling (1673–1731), the
second president, was a trained jurist and historian and former professor of the Ritterakademie in
Berlin, who had developed a reputation in Berlin for his amusing stories and who in 1713 was made a
court councilor. While not entirely a figure held in deep respect by the king, he nevertheless was given
a number of other posts along with the presidency of the Academy. And Gundling served the
Academy well by requiring that one copy of every book published in the Kingdom of Prussia be
housed in the library of the Royal Academy. On the other hand, it has been suggested that Gundling,
whose brother was a Pietist professor at the University of Halle, played a role in Christian Wolff ’s
banishment from Brandenburg-Prussia, since it was he who had joked that Wolff ’s determinism
would give soldiers an excuse for desertion (Zeller 1862, 65–66). In the end, however, the fact that he
came to be so ridiculed at the court probably had as much to do with Gundling’s alcoholism as with
Frederick William’s anti-intellectualism. When Gundling died, the king had him buried in a wine
barrel. See Harnack (1900, 220ff.). Hinrichs (1971, 417) rejects the idea that Gundling played a role in
the Wolff affair on the grounds that Gundling said he did not do so, which can hardly count as
probative.
Berlin Academy to advance their philosophical views. The reasons for Euler’s
opposition to Leibniz and Wolff were quite complex. On the one hand, Euler
certainly saw a danger in the doctrine of pre-established harmony, for the very
reasons that the Pietists had done. On the other hand, he was also a committed
Newtonian, advocating the laws of motion as expressed in the Principia as well as
absolute space and time.44 Maupertuis also had deep misgivings about the way in
which Leibniz’s natural philosophy and mathematics—specifically his dynamics—
were employed by his supporters. But Maupertuis himself may have been just as
much caught up in the anti-Leibnizian spirit of the day as actively contributing to
it. Indeed, there is a certain irony to Maupertuis’s position, for in many crucial
aspects his own thought was very much in harmony with that of Leibniz. Like
Leibniz, Maupertuis endorsed a principle of continuity in physics and also,
against the Newtonians, favored a relational or phenomenalistic conception of
space and time. Moreover, his debate with Samuel König on the principle of least
action reveals his complex relation to Leibniz quite well.45
The Academy played a central role in the philosophical and scientific world in
the middle decades of the eighteenth century by sponsoring regular essay
competitions. But these essay competitions not only reflected current consensus
about the important philosophical issues through their choice of topics, they also
arguably sought to delegitimize Wolffian philosophy through the selection of
winners. In the first three competitions of the philosophical class46—1747, 1751,
and 1755, when Maupertuis and Euler had the most influence over the Academy—
the topics clearly confronted the philosophy of Leibniz and Wolff.47 The 1747
essay question concerned the nature of monads; authors were asked to prove or
refute the “doctrine of monads,” and in the case of a positive view of monads “to
deduce an intelligible explication of the principal phenomena of the universe, and
in particular of the origin of the movement of bodies.” (Harnack 1900, 2:305) The
winner was Johann Heinrich Gottlob Justi, who submitted a work critical of the
theory of monads in which he largely rehearsed the anti-monadist arguments
published the previous year by Euler in his Gedancken von den Elementen der
Cörper [Considerations on the Elements of Bodies].48 In 1751, the Academy essay
question focused on free will and determinism, and in this case Abraham Gotthelf
Kästner, a professor of mathematics from Leipzig and supporter of Wolff, was
surprisingly declared the winner. Four years later the Academy turned to the
issue of philosophical optimism. While the official question explicitly cited
44 Euler’s views on the nature of space and time are complex, and so it is probably too simplistic to
simply call them Newtonian. But he certainly rejected Leibnizian relationalism.
45 See Cassirer (1998, 89); Harnack (1900, 252ff.); Beck (1969, 317–319).
46 The Academy was divided into four classes—medical/physical, mathematical, philosophical, and
philological—and each class took a turn posing an essay question.
47 Maupertuis left his position as President of the Academy in 1753, but after the prize essay ques-
tion was posed.
48 This work can be found in Euler (1911– , III, 2, 349–366).
Brandon C. Look 19
Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man, it was clear that Leibniz’s Theodicy was the target.
Gottsched called out the Academy immediately on the ruse in a short essay, De
optimismi macula [Optimism Stained] (1753). And the winning submission by
Adolf Friedrich von Reinhard made the connection in its title, Le Système de
Mr. Pope sur la perfection du monde, comparé à celui de Mr. de Leibnitz [Pope’s
System of the Perfection of the World compared with that of Leibniz], and savaged
the optimism of both Pope and Leibniz. Ultimately, this ploy of the Royal
Academy backfired, for it also occasioned a biting work critical of the question
and the only work still read in connection with the essay question: Lessing and
Mendelssohn’s Pope ein Metaphysiker! In it they argue that the work of the poet
and the metaphysician fundamentally differed and that a real poet neither wished
to develop a metaphysical system nor could he do so even if he so wished. Thus,
they claimed it was clear that what the Academy really wanted was a rejection of
Leibnizian optimism. More important, their analysis of Leibniz’s system also
displays a penetrating reading of the Theodicy. As a young intellectual with
scholarly and philosophical ambitions, Kant could not have been ignorant of
these matters, nor could he have been ignorant of the general anti-Leibnizian and
anti-Wolffian sentiment issuing from the capital.49
The period from the end of Leibniz’s life to the zenith of Kant’s philosophical
career also witnessed a profound change in German intellectual and cultural life.
Christian Wolff played an important positive role in this change. Not only was he
one of the first professors to lecture in German, he was also one of the first to
publish significant works in the vernacular.50 Moreover, he was largely respon
sible for the development of German philosophical vocabulary. Wolff ’s influence
was perhaps also so strong because, after a century in which the dominant philo
sophers in Europe worked outside of the university milieu, he was a professor
who successfully appealed to the insights of the modern philosophers and thereby
attracted a stream of students who went on to occupy many other professorships.
Thus, for both linguistic and institutional reasons, Hegel was correct to call Wolff
“the teacher of the Germans.”51
At the same time, there began to arise in German-speaking lands a cultivated
middle class, interested in literature, philosophy, and the sciences. At the Leipzig
Book Fair in 1701, for example, there were nearly 1,000 titles listed in the catalog,
nearly half of which dealt with theological matters. Eighty years later the number
of titles had increased to 2,600, with a far smaller proportion concerning religion
and theology. Moreover, the ratio of books in German to those in Latin increased
49 Indeed, Kant’s writings on optimism from the 1750s were occasioned by the essay competition,
though he never submitted a work for consideration. See Ak. 2:27–35 and Ak. 17:229–239, also in
Kant (1992b, 67–83).
50 Christian Thomasius was also very important in this respect.
51 Hegel (1986, 20:258).
from approximately 2:1 to 10:1.52 By mid-century there were in Germany, as

throughout the continent, ever more intellectual journals aimed at a popular and
not necessarily academic audience. “Popularphilosophen” both created and
responded to a desire for a critique of religion and the political power structures
of the day.53 While many popular philosophers advocated doctrines close to the
empiricism of Locke and skepticism of Hume, many more advocated a kind of
rationalism close to that of Leibniz, Wolff, and Wolff ’s followers. While the topics
of academic philosophy—for example, concerning pre-established harmony and
physical influx or concerning innate ideas and empiricism—were not at the
forefront of these discussions, all shared a deep commitment to the power of
human reason and its ultimately liberating effects.
Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) was the best of such Popularphilosophen.
Lacking a university position, he made his living outside of professional, academic
philosophy as a bookkeeper and, more importantly, as a writer of essays, reviews,
and books.54 But to call Mendelssohn a “popular philosopher” should not give the
impression that his work was somehow shallow—on the contrary. Mendelssohn’s
writings were penetrating and interesting, and he made important advances in
the rationalist positions of Leibniz and Wolff, especially in aesthetics.55
Unfortunately, he resides now mainly in the shadow of Kant. While his Phaedon
oder über die Unsterblichkeit der Seele [Phaedo, or On the Immortality of the Soul]
(1767) achieved great success and was one of Goethe’s favorite books,56 it is now
best known to students and historians of philosophy as the work refuted in the
Paralogisms chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason. His essay Abhandlung über die
Evidenz in metaphysischen Wissenschaften [Essay Concerning Evidence in the
Metaphysical Sciences] (1764) won the Academy’s prize essay after its anti-
Wolffian phase had ended and defeated Kant’s submission Untersuchung über die
Deutlichkeit der Grundlage der natürlichen Theologie und der Moral [Inquiry
Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality].57
Of Mendelssohn’s essay, Beck writes, “No other single work gives so perspicuous a
presentation of the Leibniz- Wolffian epistemology; every strength of that
tradition is persuasively presented, every fault in it inadvertently revealed” (1969,
332). Kant certainly read this work, but if he saw in it what Beck saw, then he
might have been led astray, for Mendelssohn composed this essay prior to the
publication of Leibniz’s Nouveaux Essais, which reveals a difference between the
epistemological positions of Leibniz and Wolff.
Indeed, the publication in 1765 of Raspe’s edition of Leibniz’s New Essays along
with Dutens’s six-volume collection of Leibniz’s writings three years later led to a
52 Ward (1974, 29ff.).

53 The period after the publication of the first edition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is master-
fully discussed in Beiser (1987).
54 Mendelssohn was nominated several times to become a member of the Royal Academy of
Sciences in Berlin, but his membership was blocked every time by Frederick II.
55 See Beiser (2009). 56 See Lewes (1855, 1:213). 57 See Ak. 2:273–301.
Brandon C. Look 21
wave of interest in Leibniz and a deeper understanding of his philosophy. As Max

Wundt notes, “the true Leibniz was to this point not really known” (1945, 317).
Not only Mendelssohn, but also Lessing and others, came to a greater appreciation
of the depth and breadth of Leibniz’s metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophical
theology. For example, Lessing’s beautiful essay, Leibniz von den ewigen Strafen
[Leibniz on Eternal Punishment] (1773), shows that he had studied Leibniz’s phil
osophy carefully, most likely from Dutens’s edition.58 Lessing argues that Leibniz
always sought to lead the reader to the truth from the path he was already on and
that the distinction between Leibniz’s “exoteric” and “esoteric” philosophy had to
do with his manner of presentation and not with the content. But this line of
argument required that Lessing know what Leibniz said in his popular publica-
tions as well as what he wrote in more guarded moments and that Lessing be able
to discern the connections between the two sets of writings. It is also meant that
Lessing saw that a superficial reading of the popular presentations of Leibniz’s
writings could lead readers astray. Another careful reader of Leibniz was Herder,
who was able to see in these new editions something importantly different
between Leibniz and Wolff in both style and substance:
Since the lively mind of this man [Leibniz] liked to see everything as a hypothesis
and present it half as a poem, even his monads, which Wolff himself seems not
to have fully grasped, were considered just a funny tale. But I am convinced
that . . . this hypothesis is the most rigorous and certainly will someday triumph.59
Herder’s prediction for the triumph of Leibnizian monads, of course, proved

wrong, but his description of the hypothetical and nearly lyrical manner of
Leibniz’s writings was right. By the time the Romantics came upon the scene in
Germany, Leibniz was revered precisely because he had never presented a
ponderous system of the sort that Wolff and his students had done.
5 Kant as a Reader of Leibniz
Ideally, scholars interested in Kant’s relation to Leibniz would have a set of

Leibniz’s works with detailed marginalia in Kant’s hand or simply extended
reading notes on Leibniz’s philosophy—precisely what we have in the case of
58 For this essay, see Lessing (1886, 11:461–487). It should also be noted that, in it, Lessing took to
task none other than Johann August Eberhard, Leibniz’s later advocate against Kant, for his poor
understanding of Leibniz in his Neue Apologie des Sokrates (1772).
59 See the second dialogue of his Gott. Einige Gespräche (1787) in Herder (1994, 4:709). Somewhat
later in the same text, Herder also writes of the New Essays that they are “just about the most instruct
ive of all of the writings of Leibniz, from whom incidentally every line is instructive” (1985, 4:731–732
n.). Herder, of course, had been a student of Kant’s, and they maintained a relatively active corre
spondence. I have not been able to find any writings in which Leibniz is discussed, however.
Leibniz’s study of Spinoza. We do have, however, a catalog of Kant’s library,

which offers some tantalizing clues about the sources of his knowledge of his
philosophical predecessors (Warda 1922). Kant owned, for example, works by
many of great thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Berkeley,
Boyle, Cudworth, D’Alembert, Descartes, Galileo, Gassendi, Hume, Hutcheson,
Maupertuis, More, Newton, Tschirnhaus, and Voltaire.60 He also had a good col-
lection of works from the prominent philosophers of eighteenth- century
Germany, many of which he used in his own university teaching: Baumgarten,
Crusius, Euler, Gottsched, Lambert, Meier, Mendelssohn, Tetens, and Wolff. Kant
also owned many books that dealt with mathematics, natural philosophy and
natural history, which is again unsurprising given his teaching duties. Absent
from his library, however, are works by Leibniz, Locke, and Spinoza. Of course, as
all scholars and bibliophiles know, one often has books on one’s shelves that one
has never read, and one often has read many books that one never owned.61
Indeed, on Kant’s death, it was remarked that his library was comparatively small
for an academic. It is likely also that Kant’s relation to books differed from that of
Leibniz’s.62 Leibniz was not only born into a family prominent in Leipzig’s aca-
demic and legal circles and had free rein in his father’s extensive library from the
age of 8, but his official duties in Hanover included serving as the court historian
and court librarian. For close to forty years, he kept an apartment in whatever
building housed the court library, and for the last eighteen years of his life, after
the library had been moved to Schmiedestraße 10, one could say that the royal
library was his house. Leibniz inherited in 1676 a good library, with over 3,000
volumes, and he used his position over the years to accumulate many more philo-
sophical and scholarly titles (Antognazza 2009, 201 and 383). Leibniz clearly felt
possessive of these volumes too, for many contained his notes written in the mar-
gins. Kant, on the other hand, came from a much more modest background, with
few books in the household of staunchly Pietist parents, and as a student Kant is
said to have bought few books. Unsurprisingly, though, he was also known as a
voracious reader. In order to supplement his income from teaching, he took on
the position of sub-librarian in the Schloßbibliothek, essentially the university
library, in 1766 and worked there for seven years, even after he was appointed
Professor at the University of Königsberg. There he had easy access to many
60 The contents of Kant’s library also strongly suggest that, although he knew French, Kant pre-
ferred to read texts in German translation rather than in the original. Indeed, Waschkies has argued
that Kant never refers to an original French-language text when there is a German translation
(Waschkies 1987, 541f.). On Kant’s limitations with French, one of his contemporaries recalled, “Of
the modern languages, he understood French, but did not speak it” (Jachmann 1804, 41).
61 A case in point: as has been mentioned, there is no doubt that Mendelssohn’s Phaedon is a target
in the second edition of the Paralogisms chapter (B 395ff.), but this book was not in his library at
auction.
62 There is a great deal of truth in T.S. Eliot’s observation that “Leibniz’s originality is in direct, not
inverse ratio to his erudition” (Eliot 1916, 568).
Brandon C. Look 23
books in all subjects. The added income from this new job also allowed Kant to
take up new rooms in the house of his publisher, Kanter, a house that was the
location of one of the best bookstores in Prussia, where it was common practice
to peruse, read, and discuss the latest works of science, history, literature, and
philosophy. Kant was allowed to borrow all the books he wished and read them in
his own apartment (Kuehn 2001, 159–160). Even after he was relatively financially
secure and had his own house, it was not Kant’s practice to acquire books as it was
Leibniz’s. Therefore, evidence for what Kant knew and of how he understood
Leibniz will largely have to come internally, from determining what topics he
discussed and how and by following up on his relatively rare references to other
philosophers.
Kant was surely exposed to the standard Leibnizian texts known in mid-
century German philosophy: the Specimen Dynamicum; the New System of
Nature; On Nature Itself; the Theodicy; the Principles of Nature and Grace, which
was published by Gottsched along with the Theodicy in German translation in
1744; the Monadology; and the Leibniz–Clarke correspondence.63 Nevertheless,
his view of the Leibniz’s philosophy was also shaped by the work of Wolff,
Baumgarten, and Meier, philosophers Kant used in his teaching, and this is often
reflected in his writings. Thus, disentangling Kant’s comments about Leibniz and
Leibnizianism often proves to be quite difficult.
Kant’s pre-Critical writings unsurprisingly demonstrate an engagement with
many of the pressing philosophical issues of the day. And, as we have seen, these
issues often related to the philosophy of Leibniz, the philosophy of Wolff and
tensions between growing Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment thought.
A few examples here might suffice to show which texts Kant knew and knew well.
Kant’s very first publication Von der wahren Schätzung der lebendigen Kräfte [On
the True Estimation of Living Forces] from 1747 addressed the vis viva dispute
between Leibnizians and their opponents, and in the opening section, Kant
quotes from Leibniz’s Specimen Dynamicum, the locus classicus for Leibniz’s
account of vis viva, on the nature of extension (Ak. 1:17).64 Likewise, Kant’s work
63 While the Meditations on Knowledge, Truth and Ideas is a very important text in the Leibnizian
corpus, a work published in Leibniz’s lifetime and to which he makes frequent references in his later
writings, it was not republished until the edition of Dutens and was known principally through Wolff ’s
reworking of Leibniz’s theses in his German Logic. I am tempted to bracket the New System of Nature as
well, for Kant shows no signs of having studied this text; his knowledge of the pre-established harmony
more likely come from his reading of the Theodicy and the presentations of Leibniz’s philosophy by
Wolff, Hansch, Bilfinger, and Baumgarten. This fact is of some importance because, as Leibniz scholars
know, the New System also foreshadows the monadology to come and contains hints of some of
Leibniz’s more esoteric doctrines. While Daniel Garber (2009) has argued that the New System does not
contain a proto-monadology, if one looks at the work of Hansch (1728), for example, who wrote shortly
after Leibniz’s death, one finds monad, substantial form, soul, and entelechy all used largely synonymously.
Leibniz himself treats these terms as largely equivalent as late as 1710 in the Theodicy.
64 However, Ursula Goldenbaum argues in Chapter 2 of this volume that Kant’s arguments about
living forces—inspired by the debate about Leibnizian vis viva—are directed less against actual
Leibnizian texts and more against the Institutions de Physique (1740) of Émilie du Châtelet.
on optimism intended for the Prize Essay question of the Royal Academy clearly
indicates that Kant knew Leibniz’s Theodicy, by then available in German
translation. Yet, many of Kant’s reflections on Leibnizian issues can just as easily
be traced to works of Wolff and Wolffians. For example, the early Nova Dilucidatio
[New Elucidation] (1755) contains a criticism of the Principle of the Identity of
Indiscernibles (Ak. 2:277), which could come either from the Monadology or
from Leibniz’s correspondence with Clarke or from any number of Wolff ’s books.
While the brief mention of the ars combinatoria suggests an acquaintance with
Leibniz’s texts, it is far more likely that Kant’s knowledge derives from the
reference in Christian Wolff ’s German Metaphysics (§324). Similarly, Kant’s essay
Regions of Space (1768) clearly picks up on issues from the Leibniz–Clarke
correspondence, but his references to the Leibnizian idea of analysis situs in the
opening paragraph (and in his Inquiry [1763]) should not lead us to conclude that
he was drawing on Leibniz. Few (if any) of Leibniz’s writings on this topic were
extant at this time, and it is thus much more likely that he knew of this from
Wolff ’s Elements of Universal Mathematics, the text that Kant used in his teaching
of mathematics. There Wolff briefly mentions the doctrine and gives a few indica-
tions of its content.65 Moreover, even in the Physical Monadology (1759), Kant
makes no statements about ontology that show any kind of deep knowledge of
Leibniz’s metaphysics beyond what one could glean from the presentations of
Wolff and Baumgarten. Kant’s Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (1766) gives another clue to
the sources of Kant’s understanding of Leibniz. In this work, Kant refers to an
anecdote from Hansch’s Godefridi Guilielmi Leibnitii Principia Philosophiae More
Geometrico Demonstrata [Leibniz’s Principles of Philosophy Demonstrated in a
Geometrical Manner], in which, while drinking coffee with Hansch in Leipzig,
Leibniz says that he is not sure if the monads in the coffee might not someday be
human souls (Hansch 1728, 135) (Ak. 2:327). Since, to the best of my knowledge,
this story is only found in Hansch’s Principia, it is likely that Kant’s picture of
Leibniz was informed by his reading to Hansch’s interpretation.
Certainly, the Specimen Dynamicum, New System of Nature, Theodicy, Principles
of Nature and Grace, Monadology, and the correspondence with Clarke can give a
good picture of Leibniz’s philosophy, but as all students and scholars of Leibniz
know, a great deal is missing from this picture. As mentioned earlier, the editions
of Raspe (Leibniz 1765) and Dutens (Leibniz 1768) went a long way to filling in
the details of Leibniz’s philosophy and providing the philosophical community
with a true resource for study. This raises the obvious question whether Kant took
the time to study these works carefully. It has become common to assume, for
example, that Kant read the New Essays in 1769, four years after the publication of
Raspe’s edition. This date corresponds to the time when “a great light” went on for
65 GW II 29, 296. According to De Risi, Wolff and others are in fact responsible for the transmis-
sion and transmogrification of Leibniz’s actual views (De Risi 2007, 101–102).
Brandon C. Look 25
Kant, and reading Leibniz at this time is taken to explain the distinction in the
Inaugural Dissertation between the sensible and the intelligible.66 Whether or not
Kant read Leibniz’s New Essays in the 1760s and this was the spark of the great
light that went on for him in 1769, it is very likely that he read the work while
thinking through the issues central to the Critical project in his “silent decade,”
the 1770s. While the “Amphiboly” chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason, for
example, contains an analysis of the weaknesses of Leibniz’s philosophy, Kant’s
charge is ultimately that both Leibniz and Locke are guilty of not having properly
engaged in transcendental reflection. And Kant’s presentation seems clearly to
have arisen through an engagement with Leibniz’s dialogue with Locke. Moreover,
Kant was certainly in a position to know of Leibniz’s account of innate ideas as
found in the New Essays through an article by Michael Hißman, which appeared
in the Teutsche Merkur, a journal that he would certainly have read in Kanter’s
bookstore.67 On the other hand, there is little evidence in the Critique of Pure
Reason that Kant studied the edition of Dutens, which might have led him to a
more sophisticated understanding of Leibniz’s system, comparable to that of
Lessing.
In his Critical period, Kant presents a fairly consistent picture of Leibniz’s
philosophy. In the Critique of Pure Reason, On a Discovery, and What Progress?
Kant claims that the following theses typify Leibniz’s metaphysics: pre-established
harmony, the principle of the identity of indiscernibles, the monadology, the real
opposition of forces, the principle of sufficient reason, and relationalism of space
and time. There is nothing wrong with this list, but, as any Leibniz scholar will
attest, missing are some crucial Leibnizian views, most obviously, the in-esse
notion of truth and the complete individual concept theory of substance—
metaphysical theses that actually ground those theses identified by Kant. Of
course, neither Kant nor anyone writing in the latter part of the eighteenth
century could have known of these views, for the texts were simply not available.
Despite Kant’s important arguments against Leibniz’s philosophy, he is not
dismissive of it. For example, not only does he claim in On a Discovery that “the
Critique of Pure Reason might well be the true apology for Leibniz,” he also speaks
in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science of the “intrinsically correct
platonic concept of the world devised by Leibniz” (Ak. 8:251/Kant 2002, 336; Ak.
4:507/Kant 2002, 219). This latter claim can easily be read as saying that, if one
could have cognition of the sort that Leibniz claimed—that is, if a human being
could cognize the world solely through concepts alone—then it would be revealed
to be just like that described by Leibnizian metaphysics. In Kant’s view, however,
66 See Refl. 5037 (Ak. 18:69). This view is suggested by Vaihinger (1881 I:48), Tonelli (1974, 437)
and many others; against this view, see e.g. Wundt (1924, 160). For a very enlightening article on “das
große Licht” of 1769, see Schmucker (1976).
67 Kant refers to the article in his polemic On a Discovery against the Leibnizian Eberhard in 1790
(Ak. 8:244).
Leibniz’s philosophy is based on a fundamentally flawed view of the nature of the

mind and its relation to the world; Leibniz, according to Kant, fails to recognize
that sensibility is a separate source of mental content and that sensibility works in
conjunction with the understanding in the formation of our judgments.68 One way
to reconcile the seeming discrepancy between opposition and support is to see in
Kant’s philosophy a rejection of Leibniz’s claims to know the supersensible objects
of metaphysics—God, freedom, and the soul—through the use of theoretical
reason and an affirmation of those same supersensible objects obtained through
practical reason. This is, indeed, the core of the Critical project.69
6 Conclusion
It has become a commonplace in the history of philosophy to see Kant’s work as a

response to “Hume’s problem”—as a response to the skeptical challenge to the
possibility of (synthetic) a priori claims to knowledge. Kant’s famous claim from
the opening of the Prolegomena forces this picture upon us: “the remembrance of
David Hume was the very thing that many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic
slumber and gave a completely different direction to my researches in the field of
speculative philosophy” (Ak. 4:260/Kant 2002, 57). Yet, the very same passage
also suggests that the Critical philosophy is a response to dogmatic philosophy,
for Kant locates himself to some degree within this tradition.70 Understanding
Kant’s relation to Leibniz, the greatest of the “dogmatic” metaphysicians, is
therefore crucial to understanding his Critical philosophy. But, as I have tried to
indicate, Kant’s knowledge of Leibniz was limited in many important respects: he
did not have access to many of Leibniz’s writings, particularly his works in logic
which, on the view of many Leibniz scholars, ground his metaphysical views or
his important correspondences with Arnauld and De Volder, which present much
more sophisticated treatments of ontology, modality, and natural philosophy; and
a somewhat modified and caricatured Leibniz was created through mid-century
advocates and opponents who could not but influence Kant’s Leibnizbild. Be that
as it may, the story of Kant’s reaction to the real and imagined Leibnizian philoso-
phy is an integral part of the story of philosophy itself.
68 Both Anja Jauernig and Martha Bolton show in their contributions to this volume (respectively
Chapters 7 and 8) that Kant’s criticism of Leibniz on this matter, as it appears in the “Amphiboly”
chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason, is overstated and that Kant’s understanding of the details of
Leibniz’s position flawed.
69 Paul Guyer makes this case in Chapter 9 of this volume.
70 The extent to which Kant adhered to dogmatism is discussed by Ursula Goldenbaum and Eric
Watkins in, respectively, Chapters 2 and 3 of this volume.
2
How Kant was Never a Wolffian,
or Estimating Forces to Enforce
Influxus Physicus
Kant ventures quite an enterprise,

To educate the world.
He estimates the living forces,
But fails to weigh his own.
(Lessing 1751b, 32, trans. UG)
No researcher of true scientific mind can today and could around 1750
ignore the consequences Kant denies to acknowledge.
(Adickes 1924a, 117, trans. UG)
Within Kant scholarship, everybody seems to agree that Kant started his
philosophical journey as a Wolffian, although as an independent and critical (or
eclectic) partisan of Christian Wolff.1 Evidence of his pro-Wolffian stance is usually
seen in his use of Wolffian terminology (monads), his emphasis on the harmony
of the universe and the law of continuity, and moreover in his explicit statements
of respect for the great Leibniz and the honorable Wolff. His independence is
seen, above all, in his early turn to Newton, mediated by Kant’s teacher at the
university at Königsberg, Martin Knutzen (who is considered to be such an inde-
pendent or eclectic Wolffian himself).2
1 “During the last years at university and presumably even during the first years as a tutor
[Hauslehrer], Kant was a definite Wolffian in the way Knutzen was one” (Erdmann 1876, 141, trans.
UG). This view became more or less the standard in Kant scholarship. See also Zeller (1875, 328–335),
and this view can of course be found throughout Beck’s work (Beck 1996). Although more differenti-
ated, Kuehn also shares this position (Kuehn 2003, 91–94). Notwithstanding his pointed description
of the Pietist ruling at Königsberg and its university and without giving evidence, Kuehn still claims
that Kant had rather inclined to Wolffian than Pietist teachers at Königsberg. But Kant mentions and
sends regards from the Pietist Kypke and the earliest biographers emphasize Kant’s interest in Teske
and Knutzen whereas the Wolff-sympathetic professors Flottwell, Quandt, Rappolt, or Marquardt are
never ever mentioned, neither by Kant nor his early biographers.
2 Whereas Erdmann emphasizes the influence of the Wolffian Knutzen on Kant, esp. in ch. 8, in
agreement with Kant’s early biographers, Kuehn tries to argue that Kant had fallen out with his teacher
Ursula Goldenbaum, How Kant was Never a Wolffian, or Estimating Forces to Enforce Influxus Physicus. In: Leibniz and
Kant. Edited by Brandon C. Look, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199606368.003.0002
28 How Kant was Never a Wolffian
It is the aim of this chapter to question both of these opinions in order to show
that the young philosopher is actually setting out from a strongly Pietist
question—just as it was under discussion at the university at Königsberg. The city
was not only geographically miles away from the intellectual centers of the
German Empire.3 It certainly could not compete with Hamburg, Leipzig, or even
Berlin where European publications, books, as well as journals and newspapers
arrived within days; where journals and newspapers were edited, based on regular
correspondences with members of the European intellectual community; where
theaters and concerts attracted the citizens and coffee shops and reading societies
flourished, providing the ground for an ever increasing intellectual life.4 You will
hardly find Königsberg mentioned in any of the journals reporting academic
events while even smaller German cities come up regularly. In Königsberg, even
theater and poetry were still considered impious during the rule of the Pietists
Rogall and Schulz.5 The same can be said about the significance of the University
of Königsberg. It could not hold a candle to those in Leipzig, Jena, Halle, Frankfurt
(Oder), or Göttingen where mathematics and modern sciences were taught by
teachers who knew the latest results even if they did not themselves make
contributions in the field.6 In Königsberg, not even Wolff ’s books about higher
mathematics were taught, to be silent about more recent publications by the second
generation of the Bernoullis or Leonhard Euler.
about philosophical differences and—as a result—had been let down. I am not sure though that there
is sufficient evidence to make such a strong claim (cf. 87–89). Cf. also Watkins (1998).
3 Kuehn says so explicitly (Kuehn 2003, 84–85) but without providing any evidence. The common
judgment about Germany’s general backward development in the seventeenth and eighteenth centur
ies, comparing it with London and Paris (although not with smaller cities in England or France),
should finally give way to a more differentiated judgment and take into account the very different
levels of culture and education in different areas of the German Empire, especially between the
Catholic and Protestant areas, university cities and residence cities, and above all book trade cities
such as Leipzig. It depended on very particular political, theological, and economic conditions
whether a university flourished and could attract students or teachers.
4 A good indicator for my claim is the absolutely rare appearance of Königsberg in the Gelehrte
Zeitungen. Scientific news had been reported according to the origin of the correspondent who
reported them. Even smaller cities and universities in the Empire and Europe reported regularly to the
journals at Leipzig, Hamburg, Göttingen, and Berlin. Not so Königsberg!
5 About the Pietists’ political networking to conquer Königsberg and thereby East Prussia and their
success since the arrival of Rogall and Schulz, Kant’s teachers, see Hinrichs (1971, 243–300). It is still
the most instructive and comprehensive history of Pietism, in spite of the more recent Geschichte des
Pietismus in three volumes (Brecht 1995). The latter is rather a celebration of Pietism, completely
omitting the public debate on the Wertheim Bible and the political persecution of the Wolffian trans-
lator initiated by the Pietists at Halle. See also the complaining letters from Flottwell and Marquardt at
Königsberg to Gottsched in Gottsched (2007 ongoing). The relevant volumes for the battle between
Wolffians and Lutheran theologians are published by now: vol. 1 (1722–1730) 2007; vol. 2 (1731–1733)
2008; vol. 3 (1734–1735) 2009; vol. 4 (1736–1737) 2010.
6 Cf. Hinrichs (1971, 397 and 132–136); Clemm states “that not only beginners but some profes-
sors of mathematics as well need to spell out [Vorbuchstabieren]; there are only very few who can read
a Newton right away. Among those who can do so are they to whose mathematical insights Wolff ’s
Elementa are still the Asymptotes” (Clemm 1764 X 4 recto, trans. UG). We get a similar statement
from Kästner in 1754, see Waschkies (1987, 158 n. 135).
Ursula Goldenbaum 29
Obviously, Kant was a gifted, ambitious, and somewhat independent philosophy

student—but he set out from a Pietist discourse. He began his studies with mediocre
philosophical speculations within the framework of Pietist philosophical attempts
to adapt their Aristotelian doctrines to modern science thereby using elements of
Leibniz-Wolffian philosophy as done by Martin Knutzen, the Baumgarten brothers,
and Georg Meier but also by Crusius. Therefore, they are often called eclectics,
but that only muddies the water. It hides their deep disagreement with Leibniz’s
and Wolff ’s denial of an influence between body and soul and their distance from
modern mechanics in clear contrast to Leibniz, Wolff, and their true partisans.
Kant’s independence (as well as that of Baumgarten and Meier) within Pietism
can be found in his strong intention to reconcile Christian religion with modern
science instead of simply subordinating science to religion as the leading Pietists
like Francke and Lange did. This intention, although not yet capability, would
allow him to overcome his weak beginnings in the future and even to approach
rationalist positions of Leibniz and Wolff at a later age.
That Kant’s theoretical roots in Pietist discourse are so often missed and even
denied7 is above all a result of our ignorance of the then-current German
intellectual discourse. The first half of the eighteenth century is still a blank area
on the map of German intellectual history, including philosophy. Ironically, this is
itself due to the success of Kant’s revolution in thinking and his dismissal of all
earlier philosophy as dogmatic. With the rise of German Idealism and, in
particular, the Hegelian school of history of philosophy and literature, Hegel’s
judgment that German philosophy prior to Kant had been weak and meaningless
became so prevalent that this early philosophy was no longer studied (with the
exception of Leibniz).8 It became a self-fulfilling story: Because we already know
that Wolff and his disciples are dogmatic and boring thinkers, we do not read
them anymore—except to find the confirming passages for our prejudice.9 As a
result, even new studies about eighteenth-century literature, philosophy, the
ology, law, music, etc. are usually shaped by the standard judgments of the last
200 years that Wolffianism would neglect experience, history, art, emotions, etc.
and would be one-sided rationalistic.
7 Kuehn even argues that Kant, in spite of his upbringing in a Pietist family, his education at Pietist
schools, and his studying at the Pietist university Königsberg, and moreover, his known closeness to
the Pietists Knutzen and Kypke, inclined rather to Wolffianism and to Leibniz (Kuehn 2003, 39–40,
see also 76–85).
8 One common attitude of the widespread Hegelian narrative of German pre-Kantian philosophy
is the splitting of Leibniz and Wolff. Whereas Wolff is considered the exemplary dogmatic thinker,
such a judgment can hardly be found about Leibniz, in order to hold on to Leibniz as a great philoso-
pher while continuing in our contempt for Wolff. But as much as Wolff and Leibniz may differ in their
metaphysical groundwork, they certainly shared just those positions that were under Pietist attack.
9 The more Frederick Beiser’s new book has to be appreciated, in taking a fresh new look at Wolff
and some Wolffians and discussing their arguments from their own perspective, with surprising
results (Beiser 2009, esp. 2–4, and 45–71).
30 How Kant was Never a Wolffian
The situation has slightly improved during the last decades, due to a new interest
of Kant scholars in the early writings and the teachers of Kant, both clearly
belonging to the discourse of early eighteenth-century German philosophy.10
However, recent authors still look at these earlier philosophers through the lenses
of the mature Kant, Hegel, and their followers, without studying Christian Wolff
or the leading Wolffians on their own and within their own discourse; that is, with-
out taking the questions to be discussed from Wolff and his partisans instead
from Kant.11 We hardly know the philosophical views of Wolff ’s close disciples
and friends—such as Johann Bernoulli, Georg Bernhard Bilfinger, and, above all,
Samuel König—because Hegel and the Hegelian historians of philosophy did not
even mention them. Moreover, we even misconceive the third generation of
Pietists like Baumgarten and Meier as Wolffians because Hegel and Hegelian his-
torians said so. But who ever asked about Christian Wolff ’s judgment about their
philosophy? And yet, he was their contemporary.12 Such an ignorance of the
German discourse can easily lead to misunderstandings about and even an over-
estimation of Kant’s early achievements.13
In this chapter, I will first present the battle of Pietist and other Lutheran
theologians against Wolffianism as a theological-political battle, which explains its
extension as well as its fierceness. Then I will explain how an abstract metaphysical
hypothesis such as Leibniz’s pre-established harmony could become the subject of
such a theological-political debate in the Protestant area of the Empire, and how
it could last for decades. Only in the third section will I then situate Kant’s very
first, but quite lengthy book in this context and discuss his metaphysical approach
to the question about the estimation of forces. While this question was much
under discussion between Leibnizians and Cartesians, in close connection with
modern mechanics, Kant’s approach lacks any familiarity with modern mechanics
and is instead rooted in the Pietist intention to secure the interaction of body and
soul. Finally, I will point to the contemporary reception of Kant’s first book to
show how it confirms my evaluation. In this way, I hope to show how the
10 In the United States, see esp. the excellent analysis of Laywine (1993); Watkins (1998, 136–203).
Most recently, we got an edition of the English translation of some important sources for Kant, among
them writings of Wolff, Knutzen, Crusius, Baumgarten, and Euler (Watkins 2009). See also Watkins
(2006) and Dyck (2011).
11 This is also true for Dyck’s (2011) where he starts from Kant’s questions to check how Wolff
approached the same questions. Watkins, who gives a good survey about a variety of German thinkers
concerning the mind–body problem, considers these various versions as steps to the final success of
the doctrine of influxus physicus thus eventually overcoming pre-established harmony, as becomes
already clear by his title From Pre-established Harmony to Physical Influx. I cannot see such a develop-
ment outside of Pietism though. True Wolffians such as Bilfinger or König do not embrace the doc-
trine of influxus physicus; others rather—under pressure—prefer to make agnostic statements.
12 In fact, Wolff qualified the writings of Baumgarten and his circle as “elendes Zeug” (Oelrich 1782,
62–63). We do not even have yet an edition of Wolff ’s correspondence and it is only recently that the
work on the comprehensive Gottsched correspondence began.
13 A full-fledged example of such a naïve overestimation of the results of the young Kant can be
found recently in Schönfeld (2000).
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Simeón Pólotski. (1629-1680.)
Simeón, whose father’s name was Emelyán Petróvski-
Sitniánovich, studied at Kíev, where the Western
scholasticism had found entrance through the Polish, and
where the Orthodox Church stood in less violent opposition to
the Catholic and Protestant Churches and the sacred and
profane learning which they disseminated. Simeón took the
tonsure as a monk in Pólotsk, and developed there his early
pedagogical activity,—hence his name Pólotski. When
Pólotsk was occupied by the Poles, Simeón went to Moscow,
where he attracted the attention of Alexis Mikháylovich by his
verses upon the birth of the Tsarévich Feódor. He became the
first Court poet, was employed as instructor of Alexis, Feódor,
and, later, Peter himself, and had great influence on the
education of their sister Sophia. He was also appointed a
teacher of Latin in the School of the Redeemer, where his first
pupils were scribes of the Secret Department, and where later
a new generation of men, among them Lomonósov, received
their earliest instruction in Western culture. Simeón developed
an untiring activity in literature, standing alone in his efforts to
engraft an antiquated scholasticism on the Russian
orthodoxy. He was a very learned man, but, like his spiritual
peer Tredyakóvski of the next century, devoid of poetic
genius. His poetry, collected in two large works, The Flowery
Pleasaunce and the Rhythmologion, is merely a paraphrase
of foreign models in forced rhymes and a syllabic versification
which is entirely unsuited to the Russian language. He wrote
two plays, in the manner of the old Mysteries, which were
among the first to be given at the newly established Court
theatre. He translated much from the Latin, and composed
more than two hundred sermons. In spite of the mediocrity of
his literary efforts, his influence on the next generation was
great; Lomonósov received his first impulse for writing verses
from a perusal of Pólotski’s works.
ON THE BIRTH OF PETER THE GREAT
A great gladness the month of May has brought us, for the
Tsarévich Peter was born in it. But yesterday the famous
Constantinople was captured by the Turks;—to-day the most
glorious salvation has appeared. The conqueror has come, and he
will avenge the insult, and will free the ruling city. O Constantine’s
city, mightily rejoice! And you, holy church of Sophia, rejoice! An
orthodox Tsarévich was born to us to-day, a Grand Prince of
Moscow, Peter Aleksyéevich: he will endeavour to adorn you in
honour, and to subdue the Moslem abomination. And you, ruling city
of Moscow, rejoice! For a great joy has taken up its abode within
you. He strengthened your stone-walls that surround you,
porphyrogenite, God-sent son of the Tsar! Peter is his name,—a firm
rock,[125] and being born to strengthen the gates he will be brave
and terrible to the enemy that opposes him. By a wondrous name a
rock of faith, an adornment and joy to the Tsar is born, and an
eternal glory to his parents.
The younger Joseph was beloved by his father, and thus is the
younger Tsarévich beloved by his father. The youngest Benjamin
was loved by his brothers; even thus the youngest Peter is beloved
by his two brothers. Peter is a rock of fortune and a precious stone,
endowed by God for the confirmation of the Church. You, planet
Ares and Zeus, rejoice, for the Tsarévich was born under your lustre!
The Tsarévich was born in the quadrant aspect, and he has come to
rule in his house. He announces the four-cornered token, as if to rule
the four corners of the earth. From God this being was given to this
planet, for this planet was found to be the best for his achievements:
bravery, wealth and glory reside upon it, to place a wreath upon the
head of the Tsar.
Rejoice to-day, orthodox Tsar! A glorious son has been born to
you! May your years and the years of the Tsarítsa be many, and may
you and your children prosper, and the new-born Tsarévich, Peter
Aleksyéevich, even now glorious! May you vanquish all foreign
mights, and unite all lands and kingdoms under your rule! May God
grant you to see the third and fourth generation, and your throne for
ever unshaken!
AN EVIL THOUGHT
A man found a snake stiff with cold and cast upon the path into the
snow; he took pity on it, and placed it in his bosom. When it was
revived, it began to creep, then bit the senseless man that had
warmed it. Even thus it happens to him who harbours evil thoughts:
they soon come to life, and give mortal stings to the thinker.
THE MAGNET
Iron with a magnet rubbed assumes the power of a magnet: it then

attracts needles, one after another, as long as its power lasts, which
God has placed in the ore. Even so the righteous do in this world:
the wisdom which is given them they give to others, that having been
made wise they may turn from the world, and may turn their hearts to
the living God, and may lead each other into the heavenly region
prepared by God for those who serve Him faithfully.
FOOTNOTES:
[125] That is, deriving Peter from Greek πέτρα, rock.
The Story of Misery Luckless-Plight, How That

Misery Luckless-Plight Caused a Youth to Turn
Monk. (XVII. or XVIII. century.)
This beautiful story was found in a manuscript collection of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It consists of two
parts: the first is an apocryphal account of the fall of man, with
the customary substitution of the grapevine for the apple-tree,
in order to inculcate abstinence from the bowl; the second
part, relating the pursuit of the young man by the demon
Misery Luckless-Plight, bears every evidence of popular
origin. The dramatic element of the story, the symbolic
account of the pursuit in the shape of animals, the parallelism
of phrases, are all devices which recur in the popular tales,
from the Word of Ígor’s Armament to the present time.
By the will of the Lord our God and Saviour, Jesus Christ, who
encompasses all, from the beginning of the human race.
In the beginning of this perishable world, God created heaven and
earth, God created Adam and Eve. He ordered them to live in holy
paradise, and gave them this divine command: He told them not to
eat the fruit of the grapevine, from the great tree of Eden. But the
human heart is unthinking and irresistible, and Adam and Eve were
tempted. They forgot God’s command, ate of the fruit of the
grapevine, from the great and wonderful tree, and for that great
transgression of theirs God was wroth with Adam and Eve and drove
them out of the holy Edenic paradise. He settled them upon the low
earth, blessed them to grow and multiply, and told them to appease
their hunger through their own labour from the fruits upon earth....
God gave them this commandment: there should be marriages, for
the propagation of the race of men and for beloved children.
But the human race was evil: from the very start it was not
submissive, looked with disdain at the father’s instruction, did not
obey the mother, was untrue to the advice of friends. Then there
came a weak and wretched race that turned to reckless deeds, and
began to live in turmoil and wrong, and discarded humility of spirit.
And God grew wroth with them, and sent great calamities down upon
them, and great misery, and immeasurable shame, evil plight,
fiendish visitations, a wretched nakedness, and endless poverty and
extreme want, in order to humble us, to punish us, to lead us on the
path of salvation. Such is the race of man from its father and mother.
The youth had reached the age of discretion and absence of
wantonness. His father and mother loved him much, and they began
to teach and instruct him, to prepare him for good deeds:
“Dear child of ours, listen to your parents’ words of instruction,
listen to their saws, the good and cunning and wise, and you will not
be in want, you will not be in great poverty. Go not, child, to feasts
and celebrations; do not seat yourself on a high place; drink not two
beakers at once; be not tempted by good, fair maidens, fathers’
daughters. Lie not down in the wilderness. Fear not the wise man,
fear the fool, lest the fools lay hands on you and take off your costly
garments, and cause you great shame and aggravation, and expose
you to the scorn and empty prattle of men. Go not, my child, to the
dice-players and innkeepers, and keep no company with the
frequenters of the tavern. Make no friends with the foolish and
simple. Steal not, rob not, nor deceive, nor tell a lie, nor do wrong.
Be not tempted by gold and silver; collect not unrighteous wealth. Be
not a witness to false swearing, and think no evil of father and
mother, or any other man,—that God may protect you from all evil.
Dishonour not, child, the rich and the poor, but regard them all alike.
Keep company with the wise and sensible, and make friends with
friends you may rely upon, who will not deliver you to evil.”
The youth was then young and foolish, not in his full senses and
imperfect in mind: he was ashamed to submit to his father and bow
before his mother, but wanted to live as he listed. If the youth earned
fifty roubles, he found easily fifty friends, and his honour flowed like a
river: the youth gained many friends for himself, and they accounted
themselves of his race.
And the youth had a trusted friend: he named himself his plighted
brother, and he tempted him with tempting words; he called him to
the tavern yard, led him into the hall of the inn, brought him a cup of
green wine, handed him a beaker of heady beer, and spoke to him
the following words:
“Drink, plighted brother of mine, to your joy, and happiness, and
health. Empty the cup of green wine, and follow it by a glass of
sweet mead. And if you drink, brother, until you be drunk, lie down to
sleep where you have drunk,—depend upon me, your plighted
brother. I shall sit down and keep watch over you: at your head, dear
friend, I shall place a beaker of sweet Ishem wine, by your side I
shall place green wine, and near you I shall place heady beer. I shall
watch well over you, dear friend, and shall take you back to your
father and mother.”
At that time the youth depended on his plighted brother; he did not
wish to disobey him. He settled himself near the heady drinks, and
emptied a cup of green wine, followed it by a glass of sweet mead,
and he drank also the heady beer. He drank until he lost his senses,
and where he had drunk, there he fell asleep: he depended upon his
plighted brother.
The day was inclining towards night, and the sun was in the west,
when the youth awoke from his sleep. The youth looked all around
him: all the costly garments had been taken away from him, his
shoes and stockings were all gone, his shirt even was taken from
him, and all his property was stolen. A brick was lying under his
unruly head; he was covered with a tavern sackcloth, and at his feet
lay ragged sandals; at his head his dear friend was no more. And the
youth stood up on his bare feet, and began to clothe himself: he put
on the ragged sandals, covered himself with the tavern sackcloth,
covered his white body, and washed his white face. Sorrow entered
the youth’s heart, and he spoke the following words:
“Though God has granted me a good life, I have now nothing to
eat or drink! Since my money is gone, even the last half-farthing, I
have not a friend, not even half a friend. They no longer account
themselves of my race, all my friends have disappeared!”
The youth felt ashamed to show himself before father and mother,
and his race and family, and to his former friends. He went into a
strange, distant, unknown land. He found a court, a town in size, and
a house in that court, a palace in height. In that house was given a
splendid feast: the guests drank, ate and made merry. The youth
came to the splendid feast, made the sign of the cross over his white
face, bowed before the wonderful images, made his obeisance to the
good people on all four sides. And when the good people saw the
youth, how well he made the sign of the cross, how he acted
according to the written rule, they took him by the hands, seated him
at the oaken table, not in a great place, nor in a small, they seated
him in a middle place, where the younger guests are seated. And the
feast was a merry one, and all the guests at the feast were drunk
and merry and boastful; but the youth sat, not merry at all, gloomy,
sorrowful, joyless, and neither ate, nor drank, nor made merry, nor
boasted of anything at the feast. Said the good people to the youth:
“Wherefore, O good youth, do you sit, not merry at the feast,
gloomy, sorrowful, joyless; you neither drink, nor make merry, nor
boast of anything at the feast? Or has the cup of green wine not
reached you, or is not your seat according to your father’s worth? Or
have small children insulted you? Or foolish and unwise people
made light of you, youth? Or are our children not kind to you?”
But the good youth remained sitting and said:
“Gentlemen and good people! I will tell you of my great misfortune,
of my disobedience to my parents, of my drinking at the inn the cup
of mead, the tempting drinking of heady wine. When I took to
drinking the heady wine, I disobeyed both father and mother: their
blessing departed from me; the Lord grew wroth with me, and to my
poverty were added many great and incurable sorrows and sadness
without comfort, want, and misery, and extreme wretchedness. Want
has tamed my flowery speech; sadness has dried up my white body.
For this my heart is not merry, and my white face is sad, and my
eyes dim. I have lost my paternal honour, and my youthful valour has
left me. Gentlemen and good people! Tell me and teach me how to
live in a strange land, among strange people, and how to find dear
friends!”
Said the good people to the youth:
“You are a sensible youth! Be not haughty in a strange land:
submit to friend and foe, bow to old and young, tell not of the affairs
of others, neither what you hear, nor see. Flatter not friends nor
enemies; have no tortuous fits, nor bend as a cunning snake; be
humble before all, but withal keep to truth and right,—and you will
have great honour and glory. When people will find you out, they will
respect and honour you for your great truth, your humility and
wisdom;—and you will have dear friends, who will call themselves
your plighted brothers.”
And the youth went hence into a strange land, and began to live
wisely, and through his great wisdom acquired greater wealth than
before. He looked out for a bride according to custom, for he wished
to marry. The youth prepared a splendid feast, according to his
father’s worth and as best he knew, and invited the honoured guests
and friends. But through his own sin, by God’s will and the devil’s
temptation, he boasted before his honoured guests and friends and
plighted brothers. A boastful word is always rotten, and self-praise
brings the destruction of man: “I, the youth, have gained more
possessions than ever!”
Misery Luckless-Plight heard the young man’s boasting, and
spoke the following words:
“Young man, boast not of your fortune, praise not your wealth! I,
Misery, have known people who were wiser and richer than you, but
I, Misery, have outwitted them. When a great misfortune befell them,
they struggled with me unto their death; they were worsted by their
luckless plight,—could not get away from me, Misery, until they took
their abode in the grave, and I covered them for ever with the earth.
Only then they were rid of nakedness, and I, Misery, left them,
though luckless plight remained upon their grave!” And again it
cawed ominously: “I, Misery, attached myself to others, for I, Misery
Luckless-Plight, cannot live empty-handed: I, Misery, wish to live
among people, from whom I cannot be driven away with a whip; but
my chief seat and paternal home is among the carousers!”
Spoke grey Misery the miserable:
“How am I to get at the youth?” and evil Misery devised cunningly
to appear to the youth in his dream:
“Young man, renounce your beloved bride, for you will be
poisoned by your bride; you will be strangled by that woman; you will
be killed for your gold and silver! Go, young man, to the Tsar’s
tavern: save nothing, but spend all your wealth in drink; doff your
costly dress, put on the tavern sackcloth. In the tavern Misery will
remain, and evil Luckless-Plight will stay,—for Misery will not gallop
after a naked one, nor will anyone annoy a naked man, nor has
assault any terrors for a bare-footed man.”
The young man did not believe his dream, but evil Misery again
devised a plan, and stuck once more to the youth for a new luckless
plight:
“Are you not, youth, acquainted with immeasurable nakedness,
and its great lightness and inexpensiveness? What you buy for
yourself is money spent, but you are a brave fellow, and can live
without expense! They do not beat, nor torture naked people, nor
drive them out of paradise, nor drag them down from the other world;
nor will anyone annoy a naked man, nor has assault any terrors for a
naked man!”
The young man believed that dream: he went and spent all his
wealth in drink; he doffed his costly dress, put on the tavern
sackcloth, covered his white body. The youth felt ashamed to show
himself to his dear friends. He went into a strange, distant, unknown
land. On his way he came to a swift river. On the other side were the
ferrymen, and they asked for money to ferry him across; but the
youth had none to give, and without money they would not take him
across. The youth sat a whole day, until evening, and all that day the
youth had nothing to eat, not even half a piece of bread. The young
man arose on his swift feet, and standing he fell to grieving, and he
spoke the following words:
“Woe to me, miserable Luckless-Plight! It has overtaken me,
young man, has starved me, young man, with a hungry death. Three
unlucky days have I passed, for I, young man, have not eaten half a
piece of bread! I, young man, will jump into the swift river: swallow
my body, swift river! And eat, O fish, my white body! And that will be
better than my shameful life, for I have fallen into the hands of
Misery Luckless-Plight.”
At that hour Misery leaped from behind a rock near the swift river:
Misery was bare-footed and naked, and there was not a thread upon
it, and it was girded with a bast thong, and it called out with a mighty
voice:
“Wait, young man, you will not escape from me, Misery! Jump not
into the swift river, nor be in your misery doleful! Though you live in
misery, you need not be doleful, but let your dolefulness die in
misery! Remember, young man, your former life: how your father
spoke to you, and your mother instructed you! Why did you not then
obey them? You would not submit to them, and were ashamed to
bow to them, but wanted to live as you listed! But he who will not
listen to the good teaching of his parents will learn from me, Misery
Luckless-Plight!”
Luckless-Plight spoke the following words:
“Submit to me, impure Misery; bow before me, Misery, to the damp
earth, for there is no one wiser in the whole world than I, Misery; and
you will be ferried across the swift river, and the good people will
give you to eat and drink.”
The young man saw his inevitable calamity, and he submitted to
impure Misery, bowed before Misery to the damp earth!
The good fellow went ahead with a light step over the beautiful fair
bank, over the yellow sand. He went happy, not at all doleful, for he
had appeased Misery Luckless-Plight. And as he went, he thought a
thought: Since I have nothing, I need not worry about anything! And
as the youth was not sorrowful, he started a fair song, a mighty,
sensible song it was:
“Sorrowless mother has borne me; with a comb she combed my
little locks, dressed me in costly garments, and stepping aside
shaded her eyes and looked at me: ‘Does my child look well in costly
garments? In costly garments my child is a priceless child!’ Thus my
mother always spoke of me! And then I learned and know it well that
a scarlet gown cannot be made without a master, nor a child be
comforted without a mother, nor a drunkard ever become rich, nor a
dice-player be in good renown; and I was taught by my parents to be
a well-dressed boy, who was born devoid of everything.”
The ferrymen heard the good fellow’s song, took the young man
across the swift river, and took nothing from him for the ferrying. The
good people gave him to drink and to eat, took off his tavern
sackcloth, gave him peasant’s clothes, and spoke to him:
“You are a good fellow, so go to your home, to your beloved,
respected parents, to your father and mother dear, greet your
parents, father and mother, and receive from them the parental
blessing!”
From there the youth went to his home. When he was in the open
field, evil Misery had gone before him; it met the youth in the open
field, and began to caw above the youth, like an ill-omened crow
above a falcon. Misery spoke the following words:
“Wait! you have not gone away from me, good fellow! Not merely
for a time have I, Misery Luckless-Plight, attached myself to you; I
shall labour with you to your very death! And not I, Misery, alone, but
all my family, and there is a goodly race of them: we are all gentle
and insinuating, and he who joins our family will end his days among
us! Such is the fate that awaits you with us. Even if you were to be a
bird of the air, or if you went into the blue sea as a fish, I would follow
you at your right hand.”
The youth flew as a clear falcon, and Misery after him as a white
gerfalcon; the youth flew as a steel-blue dove, and Misery after him
as a grey hawk; the youth went into the field as a grey wolf, and
Misery after him with hounds; the youth became the steppe-grass in
the field, and Misery came with a sharp scythe, and Luckless-Plight
railed at him:
“You, little grass, will be cut down; you, little grass, will lie on the
ground, and the boisterous winds will scatter you!”
The youth went as a fish into the sea, and Misery after him with
close-meshed nets, and Misery Luckless-Plight railed at him:
“You, little fish, will be caught at the shore, and you will be eaten
up and die a useless death!”
The youth went on foot along the road, and Misery at his right
hand. It taught the youth to live as a rich man, by killing and robbing,
so that they might hang the young man for it, or might put him with a
stone in the water. The youth bethought himself of the road of
salvation, and at once the youth went to a monastery to be shorn a
monk, and Misery stopped at the holy gates,—no longer clung to the
youth.
And this is the end of the story: Lord, preserve us from eternal
torment, and give us, O Lord, the light of paradise! For ever and
ever, amen!
THE FOLKLORE
Epic Songs.
The first collection of epic songs was published in 1804,
based on the collection made some years before by the
Siberian Cossack Kirshá Danílov. Since the fifties of the
eighteenth century large numbers of these songs have been
gathered in the extreme north-east, by Kiryéevski, Rýbnikov,
Gílferding, and others. They are generally divided into the
cycle of Kíev, with Vladímir and his druzhína, who defend the
country against external enemies, and the cycle of Nóvgorod,
in which is described the wealth and luxury of the once
famous commercial emporium. There is also a division into
the older heroes, of which Volkh Vseslávevich is one, and the
younger heroes, of which Ilyá of Múrom is the most noted.
Good accounts of the epic songs may be found in most of
the general works on Russian literature mentioned in the
Preface. The only work which gives a large number of these
epics, with notes, is The Epic Songs of Russia, by Isabel
Florence Hapgood, with an introductory note by Prof. Francis
J. Child, New York, 1886.
VOLKH VSESLÁVEVICH
In the heavens the bright moon did shine,

But in Kíev a mighty hero was born,
The young hero Volkh Vseslávevich:
The damp earth trembled,
Trembled the famous Indian realm,
And the blue sea also trembled
On account of the birth of the hero,
The young Volkh Vseslávevich:
The fish went into the depth of the sea,
The birds flew high into the clouds,
The aurochses and stags went beyond the mountains,
The hares and foxes into the woods,
The wolves and bears into the pine-forests,
The sables and martens upon the isles.
Volkh was old an hour and a half,
And Volkh spoke, like peals of thunder:
“Hail to thee, lady mother,
Young Márfa Vseslávevna!
Swathe me not in swaddling-clothes of bast,
Gird me not with bands of silk,—
Swathe me, my dear mother,
In strong mail of tempered steel;
On my grim head place a helmet of gold,
Into my right hand put a club,
A heavy club of lead,
In weight that club of thirty puds.”
Volkh was seven years old:
His mother gave him to be instructed;
As soon as he had learned to read,
She put him down to write with pen,
And he learned swiftly how to write.
When Volkh was ten years old:
Then Volkh learned all cunning arts:
The first of these cunning arts was
To change himself into a falcon clear;
The second cunning art that Volkh had learned
Was to change himself into a grey wolf;
The third cunning art that Volkh had learned
Was to change himself into a dun aurochs with horns of gold.
When Volkh was twelve years old,
He began to collect a druzhína for himself.
He got together a druzhína within three years,
His druzhína was seven thousand strong.
Volkh himself was fifteen years old,
And all his druzhína were fifteen years old.
All that famous host started out
For the capital, for Kíev town:
The Tsar of India was arming himself,
He was boasting and bragging to all
That he would take Kíev town by assault,
Would let God’s churches go up in smoke,
Would destroy the worshipful monasteries.
As soon as Volkh had found that out,
He started out with his druzhína brave
For the famous kingdom of India,
With his druzhína he at once started out.
The druzhína sleeps, but Volkh sleeps not:
He turns himself into a grey wolf,
Runs, races over dark forests and wolds,
And strikes down the antlered beasts;
Nor does he give quarter to wolf or bear,
And sables and panthers are his favourite morsel,
Nor does he disdain hares and foxes.
Volkh gave his brave druzhína to eat and drink,
Gave apparel and footwear to his valiant men:
His men all wore black sable furs,
And other coats of panthers.
The druzhína sleeps, but Volkh sleeps not:
He turns himself into a clear falcon,
And flies far away, beyond the blue sea,
And strikes down the geese, the white swans,
Nor does he give quarter to the grey-white ducks;
And he gave his druzhína to eat and drink:
And his viands were of many a kind,
Of many a kind, and sweetmeats too.
ILYÁ OF MÚROM AND NIGHTINGALE THE ROBBER
Young Ilyá of Múrom, Iván’s son, went to matins on Easter morn.

And as he stood there in the church, he vowed a great vow: “To sing
a high mass that same Easter day in Kíev town, and go thither by the
straight way.” And yet another vow he took: “As he fared to that royal
town by the straight way, not to stain his hand with blood, nor yet his
sharp sword with the blood of the accursed Tartars.”
His third vow he swore upon his mace of steel: “That though he
should go the straight way, he would not shoot his fiery darts.”
Then he departed from the cathedral church, entered the spacious
courtyard and began to saddle good Cloudfall, his shaggy bay steed,
to arm himself and prepare for his journey to the famous town of
Kíev, to the worshipful feast and the Fair Sun Prince Vladímir of royal
Kíev. Good Cloudfall’s mane was three ells in length, his tail three
fathoms, and his hair of three colours. Ilyá put on him first the plaited
bridle, next twelve saddle-cloths, twelve felts, and upon them a
metal-bound Circassian saddle. The silken girths were twelve in
number—not for youthful vanity but for heroic strength; the stirrups
were of damascened steel from beyond the seas, the buckles of
bronze which rusteth not, weareth not, the silk from Samarcand
which chafeth not, teareth not.
They saw the good youth as he mounted,—as he rode they saw
him not; so swift was his flight there seemed but a smoke-wreath on
the open plain, as when wild winds of winter whirl about the snow.
Good Cloudfall skimmed over the grass and above the waters; high
over the standing trees he soared, the primeval oaks, yet lower than
the drifting clouds. From mountain to mountain he sprang, from hill to
hill he galloped; little rivers and lakes dropped between his feet;
where his hoofs fell, founts of water gushed forth; in the open plain
smoke eddied and rose aloft in a pillar. At each leap Cloudfall
compassed a verst and a half.
In the open steppe young Ilyá hewed down a forest, and raised a
godly cross, and wrote thereon:
“Ilyá of Múrom, the Old Cossack, rideth to royal Kíev town on his
first heroic quest.”
When he drew near to Chernígov, there stood a great host of
Tartars,—three Tsaréviches, each with forty thousand men. The
cloud of steam from the horses was so great that the fair red sun
was not yet seen by day, nor the bright moon by night. The grey hare
could not course, nor the clear falcon fly about that host, so vast was
it.
When Ilyá saw that, he dismounted; flying down before good
Cloudfall’s right foot, he entreated him:
“Help me, my shaggy bay!” So Cloudfall soared like a falcon clear,
and Ilyá plucked up a damp, ringbarked oak from the damp earth,
from amid the stones and roots, and bound it to his left stirrup,
grasped another in his right hand, and began to brandish it: “Every
man may take a vow,” quoth he, “but not every man can fulfill it.”
Where he waved the damp oak a street appeared; where he drew
it back, a lane. Great as was the number that he slew, yet twice that
number did his good steed trample under foot. Not one was spared
to continue their race.
The gates of Chernígov were strongly barred, a great watch was
kept, and the stout and mighty hero stood in counsel. Therefore Ilyá
flew on his good steed over the city wall (the height of the wall was
twelve fathoms) and entered the church where all the people were
assembled, praying God, repenting and receiving the sacrament
against sure and approaching death. Ilyá crossed himself as
prescribed, did reverence as enjoined, and cried:
“Hail, ye merchants of Chernígov, warrior maidens, and mighty
heroes all! Why repent ye now and receive the sacrament? Why do
ye bid farewell thus to the white world?”
Then they told him how they were deceived by the accursed
Tartars, and Ilyá said: “Go ye upon the famous wall of your city, and
look towards the open plain.”
They did as he commanded, and lo! where had stood the many,
very many foreign standards, like a dark, dry forest, the accursed
Tartars were now cut down and heaped up like a field of grain which
hath been reaped.
Then the men of Chernígov did slowly reverence to the good
youth, and besought him that he would reveal his name and abide in
Chernígov to serve them as their Tsar, King, Voevóda,—what he
would; and that he would likewise accept at their hand a bowl of pure
red gold, a bowl of fair silver and one of fine seed pearls.
“These I will not take,” Ilyá made answer, “though I have earned
them: neither will I dwell with you either as Tsar or peasant. Live ye
as of old, my brothers, and show me the straight road to Kíev town.”
Then they told him: “By the straight road it is five hundred versts,
and by the way about, a thousand. Yet take not the straight road, for
therein lie three great barriers: the grey wolf trotteth not that way, the
black raven flieth not overhead. The first barrier is a lofty mountain;
the second is the Smoródina River, six versts in width, and the Black
Morass; and beside that river, the third barrier is Nightingale the
Robber.
“He hath built his nest on seven oaks, that magic bird. When he
whistleth like a nightingale, the dark forest boweth to the earth, the
green leaves wither, horse and rider fall as dead. For that cause the
road is lost, and no man hath travelled it for thirty years.”
When Ilyá, the Old Cossack, heard that, he mounted his good
steed, and rode forthwith that way. When he came to the lofty
mountain, his good steed rose from the damp earth, and soared as a
bright falcon over them and the tall, dreaming forest. When he came
to the Black Morass, he plucked the great oaks with one hand, and
flung them across the shaking bog for thirty versts, while he led good
Cloudfall with the other. When he came to Mother Smoródina, he
beat his steed’s fat sides, so that the horse cleared the river at a
bound.
There sat Nightingale the Robber (surnamed the Magic Bird), and
thrust his turbulent head out from his nest upon the seven oaks;
sparks and flame poured from his mouth and nostrils. Then he
began to pipe like a nightingale, to roar like an aurochs, and to hiss
like a dragon. Thereat good Cloudfall, that heroic steed, fell upon his
knees, and Ilyá began to beat him upon his flanks and between his
ears.
“Thou wolf’s food!” cried Ilyá, “thou grass bag! Hast never been in
the gloomy forest, nor heard the song of the nightingale, the roar of
wild beast, nor serpent’s hiss?”
Then Ilyá brake a twig from a willow that grew nearby, that he
might keep his vow not to stain his weapons with blood, fitted it to his
stout bow, and conjured it: “Fly, little dart! Enter the Nightingale’s left
eye; come out at his right ear!”
The good heroic steed rose to his feet, and the Robber Nightingale
fell to the damp earth like a rick of grain.
Then the Old Cossack raised up that mighty Robber, bound him to
his stirrup by his yellow curls, and went his way. Ere long they came
to the Nightingale’s house, built upon seven pillars over seven versts
of ground. About the courtyard there was an iron paling, upon each
stake thereof a spike, and on each spike the head of a hero. In the
centre was the strangers’ court, and there stood three towers with
golden crests, spire joined to spire, beam merged in beam, roof
wedded to roof. Green gardens were planted round about, all
blossoming and blooming with azure flowers, and the fair orchards
encircled all.
When the Magic Bird’s children looked from the latticed casements
and beheld the hero riding with one at his stirrup, they cried: “Ay,
lady mother! Our father cometh, and leadeth a man at his stirrup for
us to eat.”
But Eléna, the One-Eyed, Nightingale’s witch daughter, looked
forth and said: “Nay, it is the Old Cossack, Ilyá of Múrom, who rideth
and leadeth our father in bond.”
Then spoke Nightingale’s nine sons: “We will transform ourselves
into ravens, and rend that peasant with our iron beaks, and scatter
his white body over the plains.” But their father shouted to them that
they should not harm the hero.
Nevertheless Eléna the witch ran into the wide courtyard, tore a
steel beam of a hundred and fifty puds’ weight from the threshold,
and hurled it at Ilyá. The good youth wavered in his saddle, yet,
being nimble, he escaped the full force of the blow. Then he leaped
from his horse, took the witch on his foot: higher flew the witch then
than God’s temple, higher than the life-giving cross thereon, and fell
against the rear wall of the court, where her skin burst.

Leibniz and Kant Brandon C Look Editor Full Chapter PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Leibniz and Kant Brandon C Look Editor Full Chapter PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Leibniz and Kant Brandon C.

Forgiveness and Its Moral Dimensions Brandon Warmke

Look Closer Lewis Stewart

Kant and the Law of War Arthur Ripstein

The Leibniz-Caroline-Clarke Correspondence Gregory

Leibniz on Time, Space, and Relativity Richard T. W.

Kant, Race, and Racism Huaping Lu-Adler

Leibniz on the Problem of Evil Paul Rateau

Sleep Through Insomnia Brandon R. Peters

The majority of chapters in this volume were originally delivered at a conference

1. Kant’s Leibniz: A Historical and Philosophical Study 1

A Leibniz, G. W. 1923–. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Sämtliche Schriften

DM Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Discourse on Metaphysics (in A VI 4,

LC Leibniz’s letters to Samuel Clarke. From GP VII 352–420. Cited by

RB Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. 1996. New Essays on Human Understanding.

Martha Brandt Bolton (Rutgers University)

Andrew Chignell (Princeton University)

Ursula Goldenbaum (Emory University)

Paul Guyer (Brown University)

Des Hogan (Princeton University)

Anja Jauernig (New York University)

Patrick Kain (Purdue University)

Alison Laywine (McGill University)

Brandon C. Look (University of Kentucky)

Donald Rutherford (University of California, San Diego)

Nicholas F. Stang (University of Toronto)

Eric Watkins (University of California, San Diego)

2 Leibniz’s Philosophy: The Unfolding of a System

I do not think those things we have discussed in letters concerning philosophical

some important letters trickled out in the mid-­eighteenth century, Leibniz’s

3 The Origins of the “Leibniz-­Wolffian Philosophy”

4 See Leibniz (1720). 5 See Lamarra et al. (2001).

[Wolff] illustrates what needs no illustration. He proves (though often by proofs

9 Gottsched (1733–1734, 1: preface n.p.) also quoted in Wundt (1945, 121).

15 See Rutherford (2004, 215f.).

Despite the common narrative about the “Leibniz-­Wolffian philosophy,” the

32 I argue for this view in detail in Look (2010 and 2017).

4 The Philosophical Scene in Mid-­century Germany

As a matter of institutional power, Wolff ’s philosophy predominated in most

36 See Look (1999).

40 Hinrichs (1971, 440); Wolff (1841, 167–170).

from approximately 2:1 to 10:1.52 By mid-­century there were in Germany, as

52 Ward (1974, 29ff.).

wave of interest in Leibniz and a deeper understanding of his philosophy. As Max

Herder’s prediction for the triumph of Leibnizian monads, of course, proved

5 Kant as a Reader of Leibniz

Ideally, scholars interested in Kant’s relation to Leibniz would have a set of

Leibniz’s study of Spinoza. We do have, however, a catalog of Kant’s library,

Leibniz’s philosophy is based on a fundamentally flawed view of the nature of the

It has become a commonplace in the history of philosophy to see Kant’s work as a

Kant ventures quite an enterprise,

Obviously, Kant was a gifted, ambitious, and somewhat independent philosophy

Iron with a magnet rubbed assumes the power of a magnet: it then

[125] That is, deriving Peter from Greek πέτρα, rock.

The Story of Misery Luckless-Plight, How That

In the heavens the bright moon did shine,

ILYÁ OF MÚROM AND NIGHTINGALE THE ROBBER

Young Ilyá of Múrom, Iván’s son, went to matins on Easter morn.

You might also like

some important letters trickled out in the mid-eighteenth century, Leibniz’s

3 The Origins of the “Leibniz-Wolffian Philosophy”

Despite the common narrative about the “Leibniz-Wolffian philosophy,” the

4 The Philosophical Scene in Mid-century Germany

from approximately 2:1 to 10:1.52 By mid-century there were in Germany, as