None of the philosophers I've dealt with so
far can be called a philosophical celebrity – I'll hit that
milestone when I reach Kant – and even from the viewpoint of the
circle of German philosophy scholars, several of these philosophers
have been rather obscure. Even among these unknown figures, Adolph
Friedrich Hoffmann shines with his apparent anonymity. Hoffmann's
fate was to be placed between two more philosophers with more fame, as a mere mediating
point of their philosophical development.
Hoffmann's teacher, Rüdiger, was known
in his time through his medical writings and was also famous as a
counterforce against Christian Wolff. Hoffmann's pupil, Crucius, was
to be known as yet another critic of Wolffians, but also as an influence on Kant's thinking. Hidden between these two, it is not
unsurprising that Hoffmann's writings never really circulated that
much – and indeed, when Lewis White Beck, in his study of early
German philosophy, notes that he had the opportunity to see one of
the copies of Hoffman's major writings, he also points out that this
was one of only three copies of the book.
Hoffmann esteemed his mentor highly,
and when Rüdiger's book criticising Wolffian psychology
received no answer from Wolff himself, Hoffmann became incredibly
displeased. Now, Wolff probably felt that he had adequately answered
his critics in his earlier works, and in any case, he was engaged
with writing the Latin versions of his works. Still, Hoffmann thought
that Wolff could have spared some time after completing his Latin
logic for consideration of Rüdiger's text. As the situation was what
it was, Hoffmann rebuked Wolff by attacking the just published Latin
logic in a writing aptly called Gedancken über Hn. Christian
Wolffens LOGIC, oder sogenannte PHILOSOPHIAM RATIONALEM. As far
as I know, this was the first time when someone had made critical
remarks on Wolffian logic, whereas Wolff's pietist opponents had just
ignored this part of Wolff's philosophy.
Hoffmann closes his article by
explaining the purpose of the book and also by invoking the simile of
the world of letters as a republic, in which the only crime is bad
reasoning and the only judges are learned fellows of Europe. Hoffmann
thus considers himself to be engaged in a trial of Wolffian logic. He
concentrates his questions mostly on the theoretical part of logic,
the only exception being Wolff's notion of truth. Hoffmann's
criticism shows how well he truly found the weak points of Latin
logic – Hoffmann points out how ridiculous Wolff's definition of
truth sounds, and in fact, I noted recently that this
definition is truly difficult to interpret.
A considerably large portion of the
article deals with Wolff's consideration of demonstrations and
especially his attempt to incorporate all sorts of deductions in
syllogistic guise. Hoffmann argues that there are actually many types
of deduction that do not have syllogistic form, such as the
immediate deduction from the sentence ”all As are Bs”, to ”some
As are Bs”. Wolff of course knew about these cases, but thought
them to be at least implicit syllogisms. Thus, one could add an
identical proposition ”some As are As” and from this and ”all
As are Bs” one could syllogistically prove ”some As are Bs”.
Hoffmann notes that Wolff's moves for
syllogising all deductions are rather unsuccessful. For instance,
adding the identical proposition ”some As are As” adds nothing
new to deduction in hand. One might think that Hoffmann had an
unclear intuition of a deep thought developed later in more detail by
Lewis Carroll in his famous dialogue between Achilles and turtle. The
point of the dialogue is that adding mere premisses to a deduction is
never enough to make it valid – for example, if Achilles says ”A,
and if A then B” and turtle asks how Achilles could justify the
move to ”B” after this, Achilles cannot just add a new premiss
”if A and (if A then B), then B”, because turtle can just ask for
the same question again. What the turtle requires is not new
premisses, but rules for what to do with those premisses. Similarly,
one could say that the identical proposition above is just a
description of a rule stating that one could apply everything
applicable to members of a class to members in any part of the
original class.
But the true controversial topic is the
relationship between mathematics and philosophy. It is clear that
Wolff himself thought mathematical method to be suitable even in
philosophy – this will be argued for in more detail in his Latin
ontology. Now, Wolff himself had suggested that philosophy was
essential for knowing causes of things, and mathematics would then be
of use by revealing dependency relations through correlations of
quantities. Hoffmann makes the correct remark that mere quantitative
relation does not always mean a causal relationship. For instance,
people who frequent most doctors usually have diseases more than other
people. Still, this does not mean that visiting doctors would be bad
for your health. On the contrary, people happen to visit doctor,
whenever they are ill, which explains the correlation more naturally. Hoffmann has thus uncovered the familiar
sophistical move from mere correlation to causation. This simple
methodological remark does hurt Wolff's credibility more than all the
criticism about his Spinozism.
So much for this critical book, next
time we shall return to Wolff and his ontology.
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