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

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       INTRODUCTION

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

      [print edition page x]

      Christian Wolff (1679–1754)

      Christian Wolff was born in 1679 in Breslau, a flourishing and wealthy Silesian city of around 40,000 inhabitants.² The dominant religious confession in Breslau was Lutheranism, but the city also had a significant Catholic population because the province of Silesia was under Austrian Habsburg rule. Wolff, who was a Lutheran, thus grew up in an environment in which he was constantly reminded of the existence of confessional differences. Even schoolboys appear to have debated theological questions, and Wolff said he often attended mass in order to study Catholic beliefs and practices.³ Looking back on his childhood, Wolff later claimed that his interest in mathematics had been inspired by a desire to establish an intellectual foundation for resolving the kinds of religious disagreements he had witnessed in his early life.⁴

      Christian Wolff’s father, Christoph Wolff, was a tanner. Unusually for an artisan, he had attended a Gymnasium, a school that prepared boys for entry to a university. Although Christoph Wolff had not continued his education beyond school, he had vowed that his son Christian would do so and train for the Lutheran clergy.⁵ After completing the Lutheran Magdalenen-Gymnasium