CRUSIUS (Christian August).
Entwurf der nothwendigen Vernunft-Warheiten, wiefern sie den zufälligen entgegen gesetzet werden. Die andere und vermehrte Auflage.
CRUSIUS (Christian August).
Entwurf der nothwendigen Vernunft-Warheiten, wiefern sie den zufälligen entgegen gesetzet werden. Die andere und vermehrte Auflage.
The substantially expanded second edition of the most important work by the German philosopher and Protestant theologian Christian August Crusius (1715-1775), first published in 1745.
Often described as Crusius’s ‘Metaphysics’, the book is modelled outwardly on Wolff’s epochal German Metaphysics of 1720. It contains an ontology, natural theology, cosmology and ‘pneumatology’ or rational psychology. This order of exposition is meant as a methodological corrective to Wolff, who treats theology last. Crusius argues that ‘the noblest and most important propositions’ of cosmology and psychology ‘cannot be proved without drawing on God’s properties’ (Vorrede). The work conceives metaphysics as a science of the ‘necessary truths of reason’ (excluding mathematical and moral truths). Such necessary truths are described as holding in every world, and as ‘unavoidable [‘unvermeidlich’] whenever a world is posited’.
