maanantai 11. helmikuuta 2013

Christian Wolff: Remarks on Reasonable thoughts on God, the world and the human soul, also on all things in general - Fragments of ontology


It's hard to do commentary on another commentary – you are twice removed from the real meat of the problematic, and because the commentary itself has no clear organisation, there usually is no guiding thread to connect the various points. Thus, after reading the chapter on ontology I was left with mere crumbs that by themselves would not have the required length of a blog post. Still, I didn't want to make the time spend with Wolff's commentary go to waste, so I present some of these crumbs in a fragmentary fashion.

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One key point in the atheism dispute has been the notion of modalities: if Wolff says that events in the world are hypothetically necessary, doesn't this make his theory Spinozistic? Wolff's consideration of modalities here reveals his own belief – Wolff has to define modalities in this manner to avoid Spinoza's fatalism. That is, Spinoza could say only that possibility means something that has existed, will exist or does exist, which would make all possibilities become actual someday. Wolff's definition of possibility as non-contradictoriness allows the extension of possibility to be larger than the extension of past, present and future actuality. Thus, the only truly necessary thing for Wolff is God, who has no external cause, while other things require some previous cause for their actualisation. Interestingly, the tide of philosophy was to go backwards. What is true sense of possibility and necessity for Wolff, will be disparaged by Kant as a mere formal notion of modalities, while the mere hypothetical necessity and possibility in a world of Wolff are raised to the status of real or ontologically substantial modalities by Kant.

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Connected with the Wolffian theory of modalities is his notion of essences, which he clarifies in his commentary through a helpful simile: if I want to determine what a triangle is like, I need to only determine its essence, that is, two of its sides and the angle between them, because the rest of the triangle is determined through these measures. Unexpectedly, this very same example occurs in Hegel, when he explains how the sensuous side of a thing (say, a triangle) contains lot of surplus material that could be summarized through a lot simpler structure (in this case, through the three quantities). I suspect that Hegel didn't bother to read that much Wolff, so the coincidence is even more surprising.

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Wolff's nominalism is a feature I did not emphasize the first time around: he explicitly says that universals or genera and species are mere summaries for similarities between things (A and B are both ostriches  because they resemble one another and all the other ostriches . An interesting question is then how the similarity is to be defined, and in general, how things are distinguished from one another. Now, in some places Wolff appears to admit at least the possibility or conceivability that two spatially separated individuals of the same species might be identical in every other respect, thus going against Leibnizian principle of the identity of indiscernibles. Then again, Wolff also subscribes to the definition of individuals as fully determinate in comparison to incompletely determined universals – we noted in case of Thümmig that this definition appears to naturally lead to the Leibnizian principle, because two distinct individuals couldn't on account of this definition be completely similar, because they would then belong to a genus defined by all their characteristics – contradiction, because this genus would then be a completely determinate universal. One possible solution might be that the complete determination of individuals would not consist of mere qualities, but also of quantitative and spatial determinations. Indeed, Wolff says ambiguously that individuals are determined by what we can perceive in them, which might include also their position in space.

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Next time it's on to psychology!

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