Libertas philosophandi e scienza del possibile in Christian Wolff

Although Christian Wolff’s championing of the libertas philosophandi from the mid-1720s up to the late 1740s is widely recognized as a milestone in the development of the German Enlightenment, some aspects of it are still unexplored. This paper focuses on the historical and theoretical relationship between Wolff’s ideal of philosophical freedom and his equally famous definition of philosophy as the science of possible things. These two issues appear to have been linked with each other since the very beginnings of Wolff’s philosophical career, when his views about scriptural exegesis led him to demarcate philosophy from revelation as well as natural science from natural history.