Christian Wolff Quotes on Knowledge
Christian Wolff (1679–1754), the principal German rationalist of the generation between Leibniz and Kant, gave eighteenth-century academic philosophy its most ambitious systematic textbook in the long sequence of Latin and German treatises that organized the entire field — logic, ontology, cosmology, rational and empirical psychology, natural theology, ethics, natural law, politics — under a deductive framework modelled on the Euclidean ideal. The Wolffian system shaped the curricular form of philosophy in the German universities for two generations, and the categories Kant inherited from his early training in this tradition supply much of the polemical target against which the Critique of Pure Reason developed the alternative critical framework.
Quotes
-
Attributed to Christian Wolff:
“Philosophy is the science of all possible things insofar as they can be.”
-
Attributed to Christian Wolff:
“Mathematics is the model of all genuine science.”
-
Attributed to Christian Wolff:
“We must distinguish in order to unite.”
-
Attributed to Christian Wolff:
“Reason and experience together yield the certainty of natural philosophy.”
-
“One day I said to myself that it would be better to get rid of all that—melody, rhythm, harmony, etc. This was not a negative thought and did not mean that it was necessary to avoid them, but rather that, while doing something else, they would appear spontaneously. We had to liberate ourselves from the direct and peremptory consequence of intention and effect, because the intention would always be”
quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music , ISBN 0028645812 -
“Form is a theatrical event of a certain length, and the length itself may be unpredictable.”
quoted in Aspects of 20th Century Music , ISBN 0130493465