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96 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Dynamism in the Cosmology of Christian Wolff: A Study in Pre-critical Rationalism. By John V. Burns. (New York: Exposition Press, 1966. Pp. 122. $4) Not enough is known about the course of modem European philosophy on the continent during the long period from Leibniz' death to the years immediately preceding Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. This is the period which saw the development of many of Leibrtiz' seminal ideas, the establishment of philosophy in Germany, and the origin of Kant's critical thought. If we are to understand properly the major thinkers of eighteenth-century conlinental philosophy, the limits of a rationalistic position, and the range of Kant's rejection of transcendent metaphysics, we cannot avoid an examination of the thought of the one man who above all dominated this era, Christian Wolff. Very little contemporary scholarship, however, has been devoted to Wolff. Mariano Campo's two-volume Cristiano Wolff e il razionalismo precritico, e.g., is now almost thirty years old. Apart from a few journal articles which have appeared in the past ten years or brief references in books devoted to broader questions, it is significant that the best general discussion of Wolff's philosophy in English appears in Fr. Copleston's History of Philosophy (VI, 105-114). There is some hope that the situation will now change. The past six years have witnessed the publication by Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandiung of the first four volumes of a projected 46-volume collection of Wolff's Gesammelte Werke. Already available are fine, annotated editions of the Philosophia prima sire ontologia (1962), the Cosmologia generalis (1964), the Mathematisches Lexicon (1965), and the first volume of the Verniinftige Gedanken series, the so-called Deutsche Logik (1965). Other volumes in the series may be expected to appear shortly. In addition, Richard J. Blackwell has given us a fine translation of the Preliminary Discourse on Philosophy in General (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), which is the best general introduction by Wolff to his own thought. With these materials at hand, and in the face of the need for good studies of Wolff's philosophy, it is unfortunate that Fr. John Burns saw fit to publish Dynamism in the Cosmology of Christian Wolff in its present condition. A monograph on Wolff's cosmological doctrines might have been expected to begin with his ontology and cosmology volumes, expand outward in the Latin series to the Preliminary Discourse and the logic and psychology volumes, and then place all of this in the context of the earlier German series (especially the metaphysics, physics, teleology, and physiology treatises). Reference might also have been made to two books which survey the basic program and conclusions of Wolff's early lectures and his writings in German, i.e., the Ratio praelectionum Wol/ianarum in mathesin et philosophiam universam (1718) and the Ausfiihrliche Nachricht yon seine eigene Schriften, die er in deutscher Sprache yon den verschiedene Teilen der Weltweisheit ans Licht gestellet (1724). Hone of this would require that one go beyond Wolff's own writings to seek connections between Wolff and his predecessors or successors, a task which is probably not feasible in any definitive way given the present state of our knowledge. Burns chose instead to read only the Philosophia prima sive ontologia and the Cosmologia generalis, plus a small portion of the Psychologia rationalis. Beyond this he gives evidence of having read Campo's work, the six pages devoted to Wolff in Gilson's Being and Some Philosophers, and a handful of other minor works all of which appeared prior to 1948. All scholarship since 1948, and even Hans Liithje's important article "Christian Wolffs Philosophiebegriff" in the Kantstudien for 1925, is ignored. A concession is made in this direction by including in the bibliography Blackwell's translation of the Preliminary Discourse and Gilson's Modern Philosophy (presumably Gilson and Langan's Modern Philosophy: Descartes to Kant), but there is no evidence that these two books had any influence on the text. The reason for this sad situation is that Burn's book is a nearly untouched version of his dissertation which was accepted for the doctorate by Fordham University in 1950. As...

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