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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• 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.

• 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.