A History of Philosophy, Vol. VI: Wolff to Kant

Summary

Wolff to Kant, first published in 1960, is the sixth volume of Frederick Copleston's A History of Philosophy and the last of the three volumes he gave to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The fourth volume had followed the continental rationalists from Descartes to Leibniz and the fifth the British empiricists from Hobbes to Hume. This one carries both stories across the eighteenth century in France and Germany and brings them to Immanuel Kant, whose critical philosophy Copleston presents as an attempt to settle the quarrel between them. Continuum's 2003 reissue retitled it The Enlightenment: Voltaire to Kant. The book has four parts. The first describes the French Enlightenment: the philosophes who popularized Locke and Newton, the Encyclopedia of Diderot and d'Alembert, the frankly materialist anthropology of La Mettrie and d'Holbach, and then, in two chapters, Rousseau, who shared the philosophes' hostility to established institutions but doubted that the arts and sciences had made men better. The second part turns to Germany, where Christian Wolff organized Leibniz's ideas into a school philosophy of definitions and demonstrations that dominated the universities, where Lessing and the popular philosophers argued for a religion of reason, and where Hamann, Herder and Jacobi broke with the whole programme in the name of faith, feeling, language and history. The third part is a short history of the philosophy of history. Copleston begins with Bossuet, who read world history as the work of providence in the tradition of Augustine, sets beside him Giambattista Vico, whose New Science argued that men can understand history because they made it, and follows the subject through Voltaire, Condorcet's faith in progress, and Herder. Kant fills the fourth part, close to half the book. Copleston traces him from the pre-critical writings through the question Hume had forced on him: how can we have universal and necessary knowledge of a world we know only through experience? He sets out the answer of the Critique of Pure Reason, that the mind's own forms of intuition and categories make experience possible but also confine knowledge to it, and follows its consequences for metaphysics: the soul, the world as a whole and God become ideas of reason that cannot be proved. Further chapters treat the moral law and the postulates of freedom, immortality and God, religion within the limits of reason, the beautiful and the purposive in the Critique of Judgment, and the late manuscripts of the Opus Postumum. A concluding review surveys the modern period as a whole. Copleston writes as a Jesuit and a Thomist, and he does not conceal that he thinks Kant's restriction of speculative reason open to question. But the exposition comes first and at length, and his own estimates are set apart from it. For a high school class the book is a reference: a chapter on Rousseau before a seminar on The Social Contract, or the Kant chapters beside the Groundwork. The volume is under copyright, so the library gives this summary and guide without any text.

Plot or Argument

• Part I: philosophes, Encyclopedists and Rousseau

  Copleston describes the French writers who carried Locke's empiricism and Newton's physics into a campaign of criticism against church and state, the materialist account of man as a machine, and the Encyclopedia as a work of reference and reform. Two chapters on Rousseau set out his attack on civilization's effects and his political theory of the social contract and the general will.

• Part II: Wolff's school system and its critics in Germany

  Thomasius and Wolff establish a German academic philosophy built on Leibniz, divided into ontology, cosmology, rational psychology and natural theology. The Aufklärung continues in deism, Reimarus, Mendelssohn and Lessing, before Hamann, Herder and Jacobi reject its confidence in abstract reason.

• Part III: from providence to progress

  A history of thinking about history: Bossuet's providential universal history, Vico's cycles of divine, heroic and human ages, Montesquieu's study of laws and circumstances, Voltaire and Condorcet on the progress of reason, and Herder's view of peoples and cultures as growths in a providential whole.

• Part IV: Kant's critical philosophy

  Seven chapters cover Kant's life and early writings, the problems of the first Critique, the a priori conditions of scientific knowledge, the critique of rational psychology, cosmology and the proofs of God, morality and religion, aesthetics and teleology, and the Opus Postumum.

• Concluding review

  Copleston looks back from Kant over the rationalist and empiricist systems of Volumes IV to VI and asks what the modern period had achieved and what it had left unsettled for the idealists who followed.

Characters

• Frederick Copleston, author

  Jesuit historian who in this volume reaches the point where the rationalist and empiricist lines of modern philosophy meet.

• Immanuel Kant, principal subject

  Königsberg professor whose three Critiques occupy the longest section of the book.

• Jean-Jacques Rousseau, subject

  Genevan critic of civilization and theorist of the general will, given two chapters.

• Christian Wolff, subject

  Halle professor whose systematic Leibnizian textbooks gave the volume its title and shaped the philosophy Kant was taught.

• Denis Diderot and Jean d'Alembert, subjects

  Editors of the Encyclopedia, the great reference work of the French Enlightenment.

• Giambattista Vico, subject

  Neapolitan philosopher of history whose New Science Copleston treats as a pioneering work neglected in its own century.

• Johann Georg Hamann and Johann Gottfried Herder, subjects

  Germans who rejected the Enlightenment's abstract reason, Hamann in the name of faith and Herder in the name of language, culture and history.

• Voltaire, subject

  Popularizer of Newton and Locke in France and a historian of civilization rather than of kings and battles.

Lessons

• How Hume woke Kant

  Copleston shows Kant beginning as a Wolffian rationalist and being driven by Hume's analysis of causation to ask how universal and necessary knowledge is possible. Kant's answer, that the mind supplies the forms of experience, saves physics and mathematics but limits knowledge to possible experience. Students can follow one argument across two volumes and see how a sceptic's challenge produced a new system.

  • What did Hume claim about cause and effect that Kant could not accept?
  • Why does Kant think his answer protects natural science but rules out speculative metaphysics?
  • Is a limit on what reason can know a defeat for reason or a discipline of it?

• The proofs of God after the first Critique

  Kant argued that the ontological, cosmological and physico-theological proofs all fail, the latter two because they depend on the first, yet he held that the moral law requires us to postulate God and immortality. Copleston, who defended the classical arguments elsewhere, sets out Kant's criticisms carefully before questioning them. Students should distinguish Kant's limits on proof from a denial of God and test whether a moral postulate is enough.

  • Why does Kant think every proof of God depends in the end on the ontological argument?
  • What is the difference between proving God exists and showing that morality requires belief in him?
  • How might Thomas Aquinas's Five Ways answer Kant's criticism of the cosmological argument?

• Forced to be free? Rousseau's general will

  Rousseau held that in a legitimate state each person, obeying the general will, obeys only himself. Copleston expounds the idea and notes the ambiguity of a will that can be wrong about its own good and must be discovered rather than counted. The lesson asks students to state the theory fairly before testing it on Rousseau's own claim that anyone refusing the general will may be compelled to obey.

  • How does Rousseau distinguish the general will from the will of all?
  • What could it mean for a citizen to be forced to be free?
  • Does a Christian account of conscience leave room for Rousseau's sovereign people?

• Providence, cycles and progress

  Part III shows how the eighteenth century reworked the Christian conviction that history has a meaning. Bossuet keeps Augustine's providence, Vico finds recurring ages under providence, Condorcet replaces providence with the progress of reason, and Herder sees each people's culture as a stage in a divine plan. Students can trace how a theological idea is kept, altered or replaced.

  • What does Vico mean by saying that men can understand history because they made it?
  • How does a doctrine of progress differ from a doctrine of providence?
  • Which of these thinkers would best explain a decline rather than an advance?

Context

The volume covers roughly the century from Wolff's first German textbooks (1710s) to Kant's death in 1804, the age of Frederick the Great's Prussia, the French monarchy before the Revolution, and the Encyclopedia's struggles with royal and church censors. Copleston wrote it in the late 1950s, when British philosophy was dominated by linguistic analysis and many readers knew Kant mainly through the first Critique, which helps explain why he gives such space to Kant's ethics, aesthetics and late work.

Composition

First published in 1960 by Burns and Oates in London and the Newman Press in the United States, the volume was written while Copleston taught at Heythrop and lectured in Rome. American readers long used it in Image Books paperbacks, and Continuum reissued the series in 2003 with this volume renamed The Enlightenment: Voltaire to Kant.

Reception

The Kant chapters became one of the most used parts of the series, valued by students for following Kant's arguments step by step without technical shortcuts. Readers have noted that Copleston's French chapters move quickly across many minor figures, and that his concluding judgments reflect a Thomist's reservations about Kant, which he states openly.

Comparisons

• Critique of Pure Reason

  Four of Copleston's Kant chapters follow the first Critique in order, from the aesthetic and analytic to the dialectic; read a chapter alongside the Preface to the second edition to see where his paraphrase compresses Kant's own claims.

• Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

  The chapter on morality draws its account of the good will, duty and the formulas of the categorical imperative mainly from the Groundwork of 1785, so the two can be read as exposition and source.

• Critique of Practical Reason

  Copleston's treatment of the postulates of freedom, immortality and God depends on the second Critique, where Kant argues that the highest good obliges practical reason to assume what speculative reason cannot prove.

• The Critique of Judgement

  The aesthetics and teleology chapter summarizes the third Critique's analysis of the beautiful, the sublime and natural purposiveness, and presents it as Kant's bridge between nature and freedom.

• An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

  Hume's section on necessary connection is the challenge from which Copleston's Kant begins, so reading Hume's Enquiry first makes the problem of the first Critique concrete.

• The Social Contract

  Copleston's second Rousseau chapter is an exposition of the Social Contract of 1762, with particular attention to the difference between the general will and the will of all.

• Candide: Or Optimism

  Voltaire's satire of Leibnizian optimism is the literary face of the French Enlightenment Copleston surveys in Part I, and it mocks the same Leibniz-Wolff system whose German form Part II describes.

• A History of Philosophy, Vol. V: Hobbes to Hume

  The preceding volume ends with Hume and the Scottish common-sense reply; this one picks up the same problem on the continent and shows Kant answering it.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The four-part plan: France, Germany, the philosophy of history, then Kant. Ask why Copleston puts the history of historical thinking between the German Enlightenment and Kant.
• Wolff's division of philosophy into ontology, cosmology, rational psychology and natural theology. Kant's first Critique attacks these one by one, so keep the list beside you.
• Hamann and Herder's complaint that the Enlightenment ignored language, history and faith. Notice which of their points Copleston thinks Kant never answered.
• The places in the Kant chapters where exposition stops and Copleston's own estimate begins. Mark them and compare his tone in each.
• Vico's claim that the human world, being made by men, can be known by them. Watch how Copleston links it to later historical thinking.

Key terms and names

Aufklärung

The German Enlightenment. Kant's 1784 essay answered the question 'What is Enlightenment?' with the motto 'Dare to know.'

Rational psychology

In Wolff's system, the part of metaphysics that deduces the nature of the soul from the concept of a thinking being; Kant argued it rests on fallacies he called paralogisms.

Copernican revolution

Kant's comparison for his own method: instead of assuming knowledge must conform to objects, suppose objects must conform to the conditions of our knowing.

Synthetic a priori judgment

A judgment that adds to our knowledge yet is known independently of experience, such as Kant's examples from arithmetic and the principle that every event has a cause.

Postulates of practical reason

Freedom, the immortality of the soul and the existence of God, which Kant held that moral life requires us to assume though theoretical reason cannot prove them.

General will

Rousseau's name for the will of the political body directed to the common good, distinct from the sum of private wills.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What four branches of metaphysics did Wolff's system contain, and which of them does Kant reject as beyond knowledge?
2. Comprehension According to Copleston's account, what question about knowledge did Hume's treatment of causation force on Kant?
3. Comprehension How does Vico divide the history of nations into ages?
4. Interpretation Why does Copleston treat Rousseau as both a man of the Enlightenment and its critic?
5. Interpretation If Kant denies that God's existence can be proved, why does he still think belief in God is rational?
6. Interpretation What did Hamann object to in the Enlightenment's idea of a pure reason?
7. Big Question Can morality be grounded in reason alone, as Kant held, or does it require a lawgiver beyond reason?

Faith Connections

• Romans 1:19-20 (Scripture)

  Paul says God's eternal power is clearly seen in the things he has made. Kant's critique of the physico-theological proof, which argues from order in nature to a designer, is the point where a student can ask whether Paul and Kant mean the same thing by knowing God from creation.

• Romans 2:14-15 (Scripture)

  The Gentiles who do by nature what the law requires show the law written on their hearts. Kant's moral law within offers a comparison, but Paul ties that law to a Judge and to the gospel, which Kant's autonomy does not.

• Augustine, City of God (Great Conversation)

  Bossuet's Discourse on Universal History, the starting point of Copleston's Part III, carries Augustine's providential reading of history into the age of Louis XIV.

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 2, a. 3 (Church Fathers)

  The Five Ways are the arguments from motion, causation and order whose descendants Kant attacks; reading them beside Copleston's Kant chapters shows what a Thomist like Copleston thought was at stake.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Copleston's narrative runs from confidence to criticism. The Enlightenment trusted reason to reform religion, politics and knowledge; in Wolff that trust took the form of a deductive metaphysics, in France of a materialist science of man; Hume's scepticism and the reactions of Rousseau, Hamann and Herder exposed its weaknesses; Kant therefore asked what reason itself can know, concluding that it knows nature only as experienced and reaches God, freedom and immortality only through the moral law. Copleston grants the seriousness of that answer while doubting that speculative reason must be confined so strictly.

Rhetorical device: staged exposition followed by critical estimate. In the Kant chapters Copleston restates an argument in Kant's own order and vocabulary, and only after the reader has it clearly in view does he add his own remarks on its difficulties, keeping report and judgment visibly separate.

Debate: Resolved: Kant's moral argument for God is stronger than the speculative proofs he rejected.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Using Copleston's Part III, compare Bossuet's providential history with Condorcet's history of progress, and argue which better accounts for the eighteenth century's own revolutions and wars.

Comparison with Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: Read the first section of the Groundwork on the good will and then Copleston's account of it. Identify one point where his summary adds clarity and one where it loses something of Kant's argument.

Medical Lens

The volume touches the history of medicine where eighteenth-century philosophy treated the human being as a natural object. The French materialists, among whom the physician La Mettrie argued that man is a machine, drew their anthropology partly from medical observation. Wolff's division of psychology into empirical and rational branches and Kant's critique of rational psychology frame later debates about whether the mind can be studied as nature. These are pointers to Copleston's chapters, not claims about any figure's health.

• Part I, French Enlightenment chapters (materialism)

  Copleston's account of La Mettrie, a physician, and of d'Holbach's materialism, in which thought is treated as a function of bodily organization.

  Mind Body Physicians Doctors
• Part II, chapter on Wolff

  Wolff's division of philosophy, including empirical psychology based on observation and rational psychology deduced from the concept of the soul.

  Mind Body Psychology Unconscious
• Part IV, Kant chapter on metaphysics under criticism

  Kant's paralogisms of pure reason, in which he argues that the unity of the thinking subject does not prove a simple, substantial, immortal soul.

  Mind Body

Creative Prompts

• Dialogue

  Write a conversation in a Königsberg coffee house between Kant and Hamann, his friend and townsman, in which Hamann argues that reason cannot be purified of language and tradition and Kant replies from the first Critique.

• Classroom

  Divide the class into Bossuet, Vico, Condorcet and Herder. Each group explains one historical event, such as the fall of Rome, from its thinker's point of view as Copleston presents it, and the class compares the four accounts.

• Essay

  Using Copleston's chapter on Kant's moral theory, write an essay that first states the categorical imperative in two of its formulas and then tests it on a case where honesty and kindness seem to conflict.

• Classroom

  Make a chart of the parts of Wolff's system (ontology, cosmology, rational psychology, natural theology) and mark beside each what Kant's first Critique does to it.

Further Reading

• Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant

• Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant

• The Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau

• The New Science, Giambattista Vico

• Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Immanuel Kant

  Kant's shorter restatement of the first Critique, where he credits Hume with interrupting his dogmatic slumber.

• A History of Philosophy, Vol. VII: Fichte to Nietzsche, Frederick Copleston

  The next volume, on the idealists who started from Kant.