L'ontologia nei manuali di metafisica della Aufklärung

In this paper I am considering the history of the problem of how to intelligibly decline the exposition of the science of being as being (Metaph. 1002b21) for German university students during the Aufklärung. I have decided to deal only with textbooks written for metaphysics courses in accordance with university regulations. Between an introductive and a concluding section, the paper will consider the three segments in which German eighteenth-century philosophy is usually divided. The notion of a scientia rerum, prouti sub rationibus maxime abstractis et communissimis exhibentur (in a definition of 1894) was preceded by a number of attempts of German eighteenth-century philosophers, which went the exactly opposite direction and conceived ontology epistemologically, i.e., as the science dealing with the workings of the mind in as far it considers actuality. During the Frühaufklärung the issue was debated by Christian Thomasius, Johann Franz Budde, who chose not to write on ontology, and by Paul Rabe, Christian Wolff, who wrote extensively on it. The Hochaufklärung saw the impact of the textbooks by Friedrich Christian Baumeister, Martin Heinrich Otto, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, and Georg Friedrich Meier. During the Spätaufklärung, ontology became a target for and against critical philosophy in the works of Johann Georg Heinrich Feder, Gottfried Ploucquet, and Immanuel Kant. The aftermath of the debates took place during the Aetas Kantiana in the works of Carl Christian Erhard Schmid, G.S.A. Mellin, and G.W.F. Hegel.