You are cordially invited to our next GCMEMT lecture series event.

On 24 March 2022 (Thursday, as usual) from 17.00h to 18.30h, Matteo Favaretti Camposampiero (University of Venice) will give a talk on Christian Wolff’s notion of miracles (abstract below).

As usual, the session will take place online via zoom. We will use the following link:

https://zoom.us/j/96427734479?pwd=RVIybVZQeVZSM09IZWR0amxWT1N3QT09

All the best,

Christian and Laura

—————————————————————–

Christian Wolff on nature and miracles

Miracles were an intensively debated topic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as they posed not only theological but also metaphysical issues such as the existence and scope of natural powers and laws, the identity conditions for possible worlds, the distinction between physical and metaphysical modalities, the causal structure of the actual world, the autonomy of nature and the role of divine concurrence. In my view, the early modern rationalists pursued two main tendencies, both of which alarmed theologians: on the one hand, they sought to naturalize miracles; on the other hand, they sought to marginalize those miracles that were not naturalizable. My paper shows, first, that Christian Wolff initially embraced Leibniz’s account of miracles and used it to develop a straightforward marginalisation strategy. Second, my paper shows that after the fierce polemics in the 1720s (which also involved his doctrine of miracles) and especially after some reactions by his philosophical ‘allies’, Wolff took a step backwards and revised his doctrine so as to avoid the theological consequences of his former account in terms of marginalisation of the supernatural. Although Wolff’s earlier and later accounts of miracles seem prima facie to express the same view, a closer scrutiny reveals that, in the 1730s, his criterion for recognizing genuine miracles had become much more liberal, hence much less subversive.