Wolffiana VIII: Erfahrung und Wissenschaftstheorie bei Christian Wolff

An adequate reassessment of Christian Wolff’s philosophy necessarily requires an anachronistic comparison with contemporary issues. Only thanks to such a modernization we can evaluate the quality and the potential of Wolff’s research program. One of Christian Wolff’s major goals was to make the scientific theory of the time – which already appeared to be obsolete by the new empirical sciences and still was in the form of the deductive sciences – adequate to the procedures actually followed by the protagonists of the new scientific revolution. Such a radical updating – urged by the scientists’ fieldwork – could have better explained the specificities of the new scientific procedures and could have more effectively contributed to the progress of the existing empirical disciplines, fostering at the same time the possibility of creating new ones. Important traces of Wolff’s achievements can still be found in the current theory of science.