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On the Origin of Concepts: the Cognitive Continuum between the Senses and Understanding in Christian Wolff’s German Logic

par Pelletier, Arnaud
Editeur scientifique Pelletier, Arnaud
Référence Christian Wolff's German Logic, Sources, Significance and Reception, Olms, Hildesheim, page (29-51)
Publication Publié, 2017

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Résumé :

In this chapter, Arnaud Pelletier considers the issue of the origin of notions as developed in Wolff’s first chapter and especially his statement that Leibniz’s 1684 Meditations “afforded [him] a great and unexpected degree of light” on the powers of human understanding. He shows that Wolff’s reading of Leibniz in the German Logic is at the origin of an enduring misconception about Leibniz that will pervade throughout the whole century up to Kant – namely that Leibniz would not have admitted a difference in kind between sensible and intellectual representations, but only a logical difference within a cognitive continuum. In other words: that the sensible would be but the confused intelligible. Wolff supports the thesis of a cognitive continuum (from sensitive up to intellectual representations), whose justification is grounded in an ontology of the mind and of possible being that happens to be developed in Wolff’s later works. However, this conception, which shaped much of Leibniz’s reception in the eighteenth century, cannot be attributed to Leibniz.