The first English translation of Part 1 of the German eighteenth-century philosopher Christian Wolff's Ontology (1730). Considered one of the seminal thinkers of the German Enlightenment--a group that included Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Moses Mendelssohn, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and Immanuel Kant--Wolff exerted his influence on the German Enlightenment through his development of a rationalist system of knowledge in which all the propositions of science are demonstrated from first principles. By grounding metaphysics in mathematics, detangling it from the Scholastics' focus on the supernatural (that which is beyond the physical), and making ontology the first philosophy--elevating it above metaphysics as a science that subsumes metaphysics (i.e., natural theology) as well as psychology and cosmology--he took the first significant steps towards a Philosophy of Enlightenment. Translated, annotated, and with an introduction by Klaus Ottmann.
About the Author: Klaus Ottmann is a writer, translator, and independent curator and the publisher and editor of Spring Publications. In 2016, Dr. Ottmann was conferred the insignia of Chevalier of France's Order of Arts and Letters by the French ministry of culture and communication. His publications include Yves Klein by Himself: His Life and Thought; The Genius Decision: The Extraordinary and the Postmodern Condition; and The Essential Mark Rothko. In 2006, he translated and edited Yves Klein's complete writings, Overcoming the Problematics of Art: The Writings of Yves Klein. In 2010, he edited and translated F. W. J. Schelling's Philosophy and Religion (1804) and in 2020, he edited and translated Schelling's Philosophy of Revelation (1842-42) and Related Texts.Christian Wolff (1679-1754) was a philosopher, mathematician, and scientist of the German Enlightenment. He is widely and rightly regarded as the most important and influential German philosopher between Leibniz and Kant. His scholarly output was prolific, numbering more than 50 (most multi-volume) titles, in addition to dozens of shorter essays and prefaces and nearly 500 book reviews. Through his series of textbooks, published first in German and then in Latin, Wolff made signal contributions to nearly every area of philosophical investigation of his time, including but not limited to logic, metaphysics, ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics. Wolff is perhaps best known in his role as (co-)founder of the "Leibnizian-Wolffian philosophy", and while Wolff himself rejected the term, the philosophical system it designates quickly gained broad, if not universal, acceptance within German universities in the first half of the eighteenth century.