Christian Wolff is among the most prolific authors of philosophical book reviews in history. He debuted at the age of 26 with a review of Italian mathematician Francesco Bianchini’s work in the 1705 Acta Eruditorum (Wolff 2001 I, 3–8). This marked the beginning of an intense and longstanding collaboration with the journal, whose founder and editor, Otto Mencke, Wolff had met in Leipzig. A reputed mathematician, the young Wolff soon had the opportunity to review Newton’s Opticks.1 From mathematics, his expertise gradually extended to the journal’s other five categories: he reviewed books on theology, law, medicine and physics, history and geography, and philosophy and philology.

In 2001, Hubert A. Laeven and Lucy J. M. Laeven-Aretz edited five volumes containing four hundred eighty-five book reviews by Wolff. This impressive collection does not exhaust his output: it includes the reviews published in the Acta Eruditorum between 1705 and 1731, excluding any he may have written for the Nova Acta Eruditorum (the post-1731 rebranded version of Mencke’s journal) or for other scholarly journals.2 We should also bear in mind that, since all book reviews in the Acta Eruditorum appeared anonymously, the list of Wolff’s reviews is actually a list of reviews attributed to him.3

In this paper, I focus on a specific subset of the corpus. Of the four hundred eighty-five book reviews edited by Laeven and Laeven-Aretz, twenty-eight4 are reviews of Wolff’s own works. Thematically, this sub-corpus reflects the wide scope of Wolff’s intellectual output. The self-reviewed works include twelve works of philosophy (including logic, metaphysics, and practical philosophy), nine works of natural philosophy (including experimental and theoretical physics, the life sciences, and natural teleology), five works of mathematics, one miscellaneous work, and Wolff’s report on his own mathematical and philosophical teaching.

In reviewing the works of his followers, Wolff also took the opportunity to talk about himself and his own work. Thus, his reviews of authors such as Ludwig Philipp Thümmig and Georg Bernhard Bilfinger can be considered partial self-reviews. A case in point is his review of Georg Heinrich Riebow’s 1729 edition of Hieronymus Rorarius’s essay on animal reason. Dwelling on Riebow’s Dissertatio historico-philosophica, which “constitutes the greatest part of the book”, the reviewer also praises Riebow’s earlier defense of Wolff’s German Metaphysics against “the objections of the anti-Wolffians”.5 Referring to the Dissertatio and, in particular, to Riebow’s historical outline of the doctrine of the animal soul, he emphasizes that this author rightly follows the Wolffian precepts for writing “literary history [historia literaria]” and also “retains the definitions that Wolff has given in the German Metaphysics” because it would be absurd to “change what has been well established by others” (Wolff 1730c, 175–6).

Another form of partial self-review involves Wolff’s reviews of books that include his own contributions, such as prefaces or entire chapters. An example of the former is his review of a juridical treatise by his disciple Johann Ulrich Cramer. Wolff devotes the final lines of the review to promoting his own preface:

An example of the latter is Wolff’s review of Thümmig’s 1727 collected papers, which also include two essays by Wolff himself, originally published in 1709 and 1717, respectively (see Thümmig 1727, 265–338 and 339–72). Wolff confines the description of these two contributions to a short final paragraph:

Thus, Wolff can also be regarded as one of the most prolific self-reviewers of all time. In one instance, he even reviewed his own work twice, namely both the first (1720) and the third (1728) edition of his Vernünfftige Gedancken von der Menschen Thun und Lassen.7 Obviously, the caveats regarding the professed scope of the 2001 collection and the attribution problem also apply to self-reviews, leaving us to wonder whether the list provided is complete.8

In the case of self-reviews, the requirement of anonymity shapes some of Wolff’s stylistic choices. When reviewing his own works, he cannot speak in the first person about himself; he must refer to the author in the third person. Effectively, he must split himself into two, so to speak: the work’s author and the review’s author. Linguistically, this pretense involves using third-person indexicals to refer to the work’s author and first-person indexicals to refer to the reviewer. In a passage from his Ratio praelectionum, for instance, Wolff refers to the beginning of his career in the first person: “When I was first teaching philosophy in Leipzig […]”.9 The corresponding passage in the book review expresses the same spatio-temporal reference by replacing “Leipzig” with a first-person indexical: “[W]hen he [sc. Wolff] was teaching philosophy apud nos”, that is, at “our” university (Wolff 1719, 122). The “University of Leipzig” mentioned in the book becomes “our university” in the review.10 However, Wolff wrote this review some twelve years after settling in Halle, so Leipzig was no longer his university. By using the first-person plural to refer to Leipzig, the anonymous reviewer not only identifies himself as a Leipzig journal staff member (which Wolff indeed was), but also suggests that he is based in Leipzig (which Wolff no longer was). Thus, nothing disabuses the reader of the belief that the book review is written by someone other than the book’s author.11

Although quantitatively exceptional, Wolff’s engagement in self-promotion was less unusual than it might seem. In nascent early modern journalism, self-review was a relatively widespread practice. As noted by recent scholarship, several seventeenth- and eighteenth-century journals accepted—or even solicited—book reviews directly from the authors, a choice often prompted by the difficulty of finding reviewers competent and scrupulous enough to read the books before reviewing them (see Léchot 2017).

Whereas the intrinsic scholarly value of “normal,” third-party book reviews is beyond question, self-reviews may raise doubts. This phenomenon is certainly relevant to the history of journalism and literary practices; but is the content of self-reviews themselves also worthy of attention? In what follows, I will address this question primarily through Wolff’s case. Rather than examining the social dynamics among self-reviewers, journal editors, publishers, and readers, I will focus on the textual relationships between self-reviews and their source works.

Third-party book reviews are primarily interesting insofar as they record an intellectual encounter. Wolff’s reviews of British, German, French, Italian, scholastic, Cartesian, Leibnizian, Newtonian, or eclectic authors often provide valuable insights into his readings and reactions. By contrast, his reviews of his own books do not seem to document a genuine encounter, since the distinction between the book’s author and the reviewer is mere pretense. One might even argue that these are not genuine reviews. Yet it is worth considering that even self-reviews may document an intellectual encounter—that between the author and their own work. I will adopt the working hypothesis that the self-review of a given work possibly opens up a perspective on the work which corresponds to the point of view of its author—not the author of the work in the making, but the author of the finished work. The distance between writing a book and reviewing it allows the self-review to contribute something non-trivial to the work itself.12 The following sections focus on some types of discrepancies from the source work that make self-reviews informative and, thus, worth reading.

Generally speaking, book reviews are metatextual in character—they are texts about other texts. This is especially true of Wolff’s self-reviews: they serve as an extended commentary in which the author retraces his own steps and describes his works from a relatively external vantage point. As a genre,13 Wolff’s self-reviews belong to the broader family of his various metatextual outputs, which include not only portions of his “fist-level” works (such as self-prefaces, scholia, descriptions of his works in letters) but also independent compositions in the form of self-commentaries and reports on his own teaching or writings. Taken together, these texts provide a metatextual framework that helps us to correctly understand his first-level works. From this perspective, of course, self-reviews of self-commentaries, such as Wolff’s review of his 1723 Monitum ad commentationem luculentam or of his 1724 Anmerckungen, actually belong to a meta-meta-level: they are texts about texts about other texts.

This structural feature of self-reviews is consistent with their function. Indeed, one use of self-reviews in Wolff’s dissemination strategy is to provide metatextual information about the origin and internal structure of the reviewed work. They also provide intertextual references that situate the work within the framework of his scholarly output. In particular, Wolff’s self-reviews supplement the intertextual information in his first-level works by referencing his earlier publications, announcing forthcoming ones, outlining his program for future activity, informing readers of his German works about his Latin ones, and vice versa.

The review of the Aërometriae elementa, for example, points out that Wolff’s use of experiments to prove the existence and properties of air conforms to the laws he established “in the Acta [Eruditorum] of last year” (Wolff 1709b, 26), specifically in the 1708 article on Leges experientiarum fundamentales. Thus, Wolff emphasizes the consistency between his treatise on aerometry and his general experimental method. As late as 1713, the review of the German Logic refers to the same journal article as containing the essentials of Wolff’s doctrine of experience in summary form (Wolff 1713a, 134), while tracing his account of the origin of concepts back to an earlier contribution to the Leipzig journal: his 1707 Solutio nonnullarum difficultatum circa mentem humanam obviarum (Wolff 1713a, 133; and see 1707, par. 3-4). A number of references to previous works and their respective reissues and self-reviews appear in the 1720 review of the German Metaphysics, which begins as follows:

Here, Wolff also elucidates the method adopted in the German Metaphysics by comparing it to the method of his mathematical handbooks. This emphasizes the systematic use of internal references, or citationes:

Connection is the hallmark of Wolff’s concept of a system. His German and Latin works both make systematic use of internal citations to strengthen the connectedness of their respective philosophical systems. Connection means order: truths that ground others must come first. Thus, by citing the paragraph—whether from the same work or from earlier volumes—where a given proposition has been demonstrated, the philosopher shows that his system complies with this methodological rule.14 In this sense, even Wolff’s frequent references to his other works in self-reviews serve to present his intellectual output as cohesive and systematically organized.

The above-mentioned 1719 review of the Ratio praelectionum was a landmark for Wolff. In later self-reviews, he refers to it as summarizing the essentials of his practical philosophy (Wolff 1721, 36; and see 1719, 124–25) or the empirical foundation of his physics (Wolff 1722, 31; and 1723b, 468; see Wolff 1719, 124). In terms of metatextual content, this self-review is also noteworthy in that it explains how the chapters of the second, philosophical section are organized:

In presenting his works to the journal’s readers, Wolff is especially careful to track the parallel development of his bilingual projects. Reviewing his 1710 German handbook of mathematics, he informs “the reader that the Latin edition, too, is already being printed to assist, by the same labor, the efforts of those who do not master the German language, or take more pleasure in Latin” (Wolff 1710, 487). In 1713, the review of the German Logic introduced this book as the first in a series of German philosophical works:

In 1724, after publishing a commentary on his German Metaphysics to save it from misinterpretations and polemics, he closed the review of this commentary with one eye to the future and the other to the present, while recalling the past:

In these final lines, Wolff essentially incorporates the work of his longtime assistant, Thümmig, into his own publication program.

Wolff’s self-reviews of his Latin system also reference his German works. Reviewing the Logica, Wolff mentions the success of its German precursor, but also emphasizes the new treatise’s merit in terms of completeness:

This book review also provides an interesting list—which does not appear in the source work—of the philosophical disciplines that Wolff considers his own original additions to the traditional division of philosophy:

Two years later, the review of the Philosophia prima, sive ontologia seized the opportunity to promote both the fourth edition of the German Metaphysics and the forthcoming Cosmologia generalis:

In addition to referencing his own works, Wolff’s self-reviews also cite other authors. The most significant case is Leibniz, whose mentions in these self-reviews do not always correspond to those in the respective source works. This gives the impression that Wolff sometimes used his self-reviews to comment on the thorny issue of his debts to Leibniz, an issue which his opponents frequently emphasized to question his originality.

Wolff’s first public acknowledgment of Leibniz’s impact on his thought is his famous claim in the preface to the German Logic that he received “a great light” from Leibniz’s 1684 Meditationes de cognitione, veritate et ideis.15 Reporting this claim, the review of the German Logic explains that Wolff borrowed from Leibniz the criteria for distinguishing concepts according to their clarity and distinctness. At the same time, however, the review points out that Wolff “adds for his part [de suo] how we come to obscure or clear, and confused or distinct notions, and when notions finally become adequate” (Wolff 1713a, 133).

The claim to originality even when adopting Leibniz’s ideas also appears in Wolff’s review of his Ratio praelectionum. Whereas this work touches upon the link between the contingency of the actual world and the plurality of possible worlds without mentioning Leibniz,16 the review credits Wolff with providing a demonstration that Leibniz had failed to supply: “From the nature of contingent things, our [Author] demonstrates the possibility of more than one universe, which Leibniz assumes in the Theodicy”.17

The same point is made in the review of the German Metaphysics, which informs us that in the theological chapter of this work, Wolff “also demonstrates what Leibniz asserts without demonstration in the Theodicy, namely that God contemplates the whole universe in the smallest part of space”.18 This self-review makes similar claims concerning both the Principle of Sufficient Reason and the Principle of Indiscernibles. As for the former, the review acknowledges Leibniz’s pioneering effort to “introduce” this principle “in metaphysics”, but points out that Wolff “gives a double demonstration of it, whereas Leibniz used to prove it solely by induction” (Wolff 1720a, 372). As for the latter, the review emphasizes that Wolff establishes the Principle of Indiscernibles not only by means of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, “as with Leibniz”, but also by means of “the notion of contingent beings”.19 Although this second deduction of the Principle of Indiscernibles is indeed carried out in the German Metaphysics,20 its independence from Leibniz is explicitly asserted only in the book review.

Thus, Wolff’s self-reviews align with his general strategy of claiming originality for his own contributions whenever possible, particularly by crediting himself with proving what Leibniz left unproved. In one case at least, comparing the self-review with the original work shows Wolff downplaying Leibniz’s role. Concerning the ars characteristica combinatoria (or, to use Wolff’s German term, Verbindungs-Kunst der Zeichen), the German Metaphysics cites a letter to Oldenburg and a passage from the Miscellanea Berolinensia as evidence that “Leibniz had an idea [Begriff] of this art”, and that only the “imperfect state of sciences” prevented him from developing it.21 By contrast, the review reduces this to the claim that the “bare name” of the art occurs in one of Leibniz’s letters (Wolff 1720a, 375), thereby suggesting that Leibniz introduced merely a name rather than an idea.

Apart from metatextual and cross-referential information, what do Wolff’s self-reviews contribute to his works? The possible answers range between two extremes, namely from the negative view that they are entirely unoriginal to the positive view that they should be valued as much as his independent, original works. While the positive extreme is hardly plausible, the negative extreme may appear justified at first sight: Wolff’s self-reviews are primarily intended to summarize his books. Their approach is almost entirely descriptive rather than evaluative. Just like his reviews of other authors, they provide a clear, orderly, and reasonably detailed overview of the work’s content. This is consistent with their purpose of attracting readers while also making the works’ contents known to a broader audience than Wolff’s actual readership. This is especially true of his Latin reviews of his German works: Latin summaries were essential for dissemination abroad. Moreover, insofar as they were informative rather than critical, privileging description over evaluation, they were less likely to expose him to the widespread prejudice against self-reviewers, who were generally suspected of lacking the impartiality necessary for writing book reviews (see Léchot 2017; Gantet 2025, 36).

Yet, it would be hasty to conclude that Wolff’s self-reviews are mere summaries. An obvious difference lies in their material conditions. Like all printed texts, book reviews have intrinsic space limitations, a fact of which Wolff was acutely aware. In some cases, he adduces these constraints as the reason for omitting parts of a book. For example, when reviewing the philosophical section of his Ratio praelectionum, he mentions that he would have “more things to report”, if he did not “fear that the review would exceed the set limits” (Wolff 1719, 121). In the same vein, at the end of his (unusually long) review of his German Metaphysics, he regretfully mentions the theological topics that the review is forced to omit due to lack of space. Even major theological topics addressed in the final chapter of the German Metaphysics—such as the creation and conservation of the world, the permission of evil, and God’s attributes—cannot be included in the book review,

These lines illustrate the challenge of summarizing systematic writings. Since reviews must condense lengthy arguments into a small amount of space, they cannot reproduce the chain of reasoning that constitutes a system (in Wolff’s sense). For the most part, reviewers can only mention the main topics and theses found in a work, thus leaving much unexplained. Reviews of systematic books, such as Wolff’s, cannot be systematic themselves; they must forgo both systematicity and completeness.

This seems to make the position of self-reviews even worse. The summaries they provide cannot even count as complete (albeit scaled-down) reproductions of the respective works. However accurate, they remain inevitably partial and fragmentary. Yet, from another perspective, precisely this discrepancy from the source work is what makes (self-)reviews more than dull summaries. Forced to select some contents while neglecting others, book reviewers create their own perspective view of the work. They alternate zooming in and zooming out, thereby foregrounding some parts or subjects at the expense of others.

Wolff’s self-reviews are no exception. Rather than allocating space to each topic proportionate to the corresponding section of the work, he often prefers to focus on the specific content he wants to highlight. A case in point is his aforementioned review of his Anfangs-Gründe aller mathematischen Wissenschafften. This four-volume work comprises some two thousand pages, ranging from pure mathematics (arithmetic, geometry, algebra etc.) to applied mathematical disciplines (architecture, mechanics, optics, astronomy etc.). Wolff’s review of this massive handbook spans five pages. Unable to outline the content of each section in detail, Wolff focuses on general issues concerning the mathematical method, the applicability of mathematics to science and technology, and the educational purposes, tools, and strategies of his handbook. Specific topics are only mentioned by way of example. At the end of the review, however, Wolff addresses a specific problem regarding the exegetical implications of astronomy. He introduces this subject as an addition to the review:

The review then summarizes Wolff’s attempt to reconcile Copernicanism with the Scriptural episode of the Sun standing still. In short, he argues that Scripture should be read as a historical text describing both natural and supernatural phenomena as they would appear to onlookers, rather than a scientific text explaining the causes of such phenomena (see Favaretti Camposampiero 2022). In the book, this hermeneutic doctrine is discussed in less than four pages out of two thousand (see Wolff 1710a, vol. III, 345–48). In the review, the corresponding account takes up all the last eighteen lines, which is to say roughly half a page out of five. This disproportionate conclusion to an otherwise compendious review is clearly intended to highlight a “philosophical” passage that might easily escape notice in the depths of a four-volume mathematical work. At the same time, the reviewer’s concern with this specific topic demonstrates its importance to Wolff.22 Although quantitatively irrelevant, the paragraphs on Biblical exegesis are philosophically paramount. The review restores their real significance by adjusting their proportion to the entire work.

Even summaries may differ from the source work, insofar as they express the same content differently. Summarizing entails reformulation, which allows for the addition of information, at least in terms of clarity and disambiguation. The brevity of book reviews may prompt reviewers to avoid roundabout expressions and be more straightforward. By retrospectively reformulating their own claims, self-reviewers have the opportunity to clarify the intended meaning of certain passages, provide further explanations, or even venture stronger, less cautious formulations.

A case in point is Wolff’s review of his first book, the 1709 Aërometriae elementa. Nearly one-sixth of the review is devoted to the Preface, which actually takes up little more than one-thirtieth of the book, thus offering another example of the disproportion between parts of the source work and parts of the review. The Preface was a milestone in the development of Wolff’s metaphilosophy, as it first publicly expounded his definition of philosophy as “the science of all possible things”, or “the science of possible things as such [rerum possibilium, qua talium, scientiam]” (Wolff 1709a, Preface, unpaginated). In his subsequent works, Wolff steadily draws on this definition whenever addressing metaphilosophical issues. However, he never repeats the original formulation, instead trying out various alternatives which arguably involve a gradual shift in meaning (see Favaretti Camposampiero 2023). This process of reformulation already begins in the review of the 1709 book, where the definition is reported as follows: “For him [sc. Wolff], philosophy is the science of possible things insofar as they are possible [rerum possibilium, quatenus possibiles sunt, scientia]” (Wolff 1709b, 24). Four years later, the first edition of Wolff’s German Logic adopts a German version of this formulation.23 However, replacing the original “as such” formulation with an insofar-clause also paves the way for the mature formulation, which splits the notion of possibility into two different modal concepts: “Philosophy is the science of possible things insofar as they can be [scientia possibilium, quatenus esse possunt]”.24 Thus, Wolff’s 1709 self-review documents an early stage in this evolution. Two decades later, his self-review of the Philosophia rationalis sive logica reports the final stage: according to the definition given in the Discursus praeliminaris de philosophia in genere, philosophy has the task of explaining “how the possible can become actual [actum consequi]”.25

In some cases, the review specifies a concept that the book expresses more generically. The review of the Ratio praelectionum, for example, summarizes the twenty-six paragraphs devoted to natural theology in just six lines. Nevertheless, whereas the source work simply mentions two different “notions” of God—God as the substance representing all possible worlds to itself, and God as the self-subsistent being—the review distinguishes the one from the other as two different types of definition:

This detail, also repeated in the review of the German Metaphysics,26 may be relevant to reconstructing the logic of Wolff’s a priori and a posteriori arguments for God’s existence, and their relationship to one another.

In other cases, the review describes the content of the book by employing expressions drawn from Wolff’s vocabulary that do not themselves occur in the text, thereby offering helpful hints to interpreters. A case in point is the theory of cognition expounded in Wolff’s logical works. As mentioned above, this theory owes a great deal to Leibniz’s Meditationes de cognitione, veritate et ideis. In addition to the distinctions between degrees of conceptual clarity, Wolff also borrows from Leibniz the distinction between intuitive and symbolic thought, which he further develops in his psychological works as a distinction between intuitive and symbolic cognition. Since these terms never occur either in the German Logic or the Latin Logic, one might be led to conclude that the Leibnizian distinction between two modes of cognition is absent from Wolff’s logic and pertains only to his psychology. In fact, however, the doctrine of the use of words that Wolff develops in both Logics—and especially his claim that the production of intelligible speech is independent of the speaker’s actual grasp of its meaning—is grounded precisely in Leibniz’s distinction (see Favaretti Camposampiero 2009). Wolff’s reviews of both works provide conclusive evidence for this interpretation, as they explicitly employ the Leibnizian terminology. For example, the review of the German Logic describes the content of its second chapter by evoking the opposition between the intuition of ideas and the use of symbols:

The review of the Latin Logic is even more explicit in linking Wolff’s cognitive doctrines to the intuitive/symbolic distinction. Its summary of the “theoretical part” of the work concludes with the following remark:

Reformulations are even more significant in Wolff’s reviews of his German works. Like all other articles in the Acta Eruditorum, these reviews had to be written in Latin. This linguistic requirement, however, also served Wolff’s dissemination strategy. By reviewing his German works in Latin, he could reach a non-German-speaking audience and thus partially fulfill his international ambitions even before beginning the rewriting of his whole system in Latin. These self-reviews made doctrines originally formulated in German also available in Latin. Because of this shift in language, they are of particular terminological interest. In this case, the reformulation of the source text entails translation from one language into another. By reviewing his books in Latin, Wolff de facto attempted an abridged translation of his German system, foreshadowing his subsequent series of Latin works.

As is well known, Wolff’s German works were foundational for the development of German philosophical terminology. The self-reviews that accompanied their publication reveal which Latin terms Wolff had in mind when introducing certain German expressions into his philosophical vocabulary, thereby shedding light on their intended meaning. We might even regard these self-reviews as a sort of laboratory in which Wolff tested linguistic strategies for rendering his philosophical system in Latin. As the following examples show, the terminology of metaphysics is especially illuminating in this respect.

In the same set of paragraphs from the German Metaphysics discussed in the previous section, Wolff also draws on Leibniz’s argument for contingency from infinite analysis. When we attempt to explain why something occurs in the actual world, we can only point to a proximate cause, which in turn is the effect of a previous cause, and so on. This search for reasons leads upstream along an endless chain of contingent causes, none of which can serve as the chain’s first, uncaused link. This regress manifests the distinction between contingent facts and necessary truths:

In the 1720s, Wolff’s opponents cited this passage as evidence of his endorsement of Spinoza’s infinite regress in the chain of finite causes. As I have shown elsewhere (see Favaretti Camposampiero 2021, 255), part of Wolff’s defensive strategy consisted in denying the charge. Concerning the passage just quoted, he emphasized his use of “innumerable” instead of “infinite” as evidence that he did not intend to commit himself to an infinite regress (Wolff 1724a, par. 201). When I first questioned the sincerity of Wolff’s retrospective self-interpretation, I unfortunately overlooked the strongest evidence against it, which appears in his self-review of the German Metaphysics. Outlining this work in Latin, Wolff summarizes the argument for contingency quoted above as follows: “Contingent things [contingentia] are determined to actuality by an infinite series of causes [per infinitam seriem causarum] and are therefore not comprehended by a perfect analysis” (Wolff 1720a, 377). The Latin reformulation shows no reticence to describe the causal chain as “infinite,” contradicting Wolff’s later self-declared intention and thereby confirming my reconstruction of this episode. In 1720, his argument for distinguishing contingent events from necessary truths was indeed based on the idea of an infinite causal regress.

In conclusion, if we value philosophical book reviews solely for their capacity to take a critical stance, raise objections, and spark debate, Wolff’s self-reviews will inevitably fall short of our expectations. By contrast, if we take the time to compare them with their source works and read them as variations in the way he expressed his ideas, they cease to be mere summaries and instead function as complements to those works. We can then reassess self-reviews as valuable guides for exploring the complexities of Wolff’s thought, and appreciate their ability to preserve information that would otherwise be lost.

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Favaretti Camposampiero, Matteo. 2023. “Christian Wolff and the Science of All Possible Things.” Rivista di filosofia 114, 3: 443–66.

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Riebow, Georg Heinrich. 1726. Fernere Erläuterung der vernünfftigen Gedancken des Herrn Hof-Rath Wolfens von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen, auch allen Dingen überhaupt, wie auch einiger Puncte aus der Sitten-Lehre. Frankfurt and Leipzig: s.n. (repr. in GW III 70).

Sgarbi, Marco. 2025. “Introduction to Philosophical Reviews in German Territories (1668-1799).” In Philosophical Reviews in German Territories (1668-1799), vol. I, edited by Marco Sgarbi, 7–14. Firenze: Firenze University Press.

Thümmig, Ludwig Philipp. 1727. Meletemata varii et rarioris argumenti in unum volumen collecta. Braunschweig and Leipzig: Renger.

Wallis, John. 1699. Operum mathematicorum volumen tertium. Oxford: Sheldonian Theatre.

Wolff, Christian. 1707. “Solutio nonnullarum difficultatum circa mentem humanam obviarum, ubi simul agitur de origine notionum et facultate ratiocinandi.” Acta Eruditorum (November): 507–14 (repr. in Wolff 1755, Sect. I, 11–7).

Wolff, Christian. 1708. “Leges experientiarum fundamentales.” Acta Eruditorum (April): 163–66 (repr. in Wolff 1755, Sect. I, 18–21).

Wolff, Christian. 1709a. Aërometriae elementa, in quibus aliquot aëris vires ac proprietates juxta methodum geometrarum demonstrantur. Leipzig: Lankis (repr. in GW II 37).

Wolff, Christian. 1709b. “[Review of] Aërometriae elementa […] Autore Christiano Wolfio […].” Acta Eruditorum (Januar): 24–31 (repr. in Wolff 2001, vol. I, 356–63).

Wolff, Christian. 1710a. Anfangs-Gründe aller mathematischen Wissenschafften. 4 vols. Halle: Renger (repr. of the 1750–57 ed. in GW I 12–5).

Wolff, Christian. 1710b. “[Review of] Anfangs-Gründe aller mathematischen Wissenschafften […] edita a Christiano Wolfio […].” Acta Eruditorum (November): 486–92 (repr. in Wolff 2001, vol. I, 497–503).

Wolff, Christian. 1713a. “[Review of] Vernünfftige Gedancken von den Kräfften des menschlichen Verstandes […] Autore Christiano Wolfio […].” Acta Eruditorum (March): 133–37 (repr. in Wolff 2001, vol. II, 687–91).

Wolff, Christian. 1713b. Vernünfftige Gedancken von den Kräfften des menschlichen Verstandes und ihrem richtigen Gebrauche in Erkäntnis der Wahrheit [= German Logic]. Halle: Renger.

Wolff, Christian. 1717. Specimen physicae ad theologiam naturalem adplicatae, sistens notionem intellectus divini per opera naturae illustratam. Halle: Zahn.

Wolff, Christian. 1718. Ratio praelectionum wolfianarum in mathesin et philosophiam universam. Halle: Renger (repr. of the 1735 ed. in GW II 36).

Wolff, Christian. 1719. “[Review of] Ratio praelectionum wolfianarum in mathesin et philosophiam universam.” Acta Eruditorum (March): 118–26 (repr. in Wolff 2001, vol. III, 1039–47).

Wolff, Christian. 1720a. “[Review of] Vernünfftige Gedancken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen […] Autore Christiano Wolfio […].” Acta Eruditorum (August): 371–84 (repr. in Wolff 2001, vol. III, 1151–64).

Wolff, Christian. 1720b. Vernünfftige Gedancken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen, auch allen Dingen überhaupt [= German Metaphysics]. Halle: Renger (repr. of the 1751 ed. in GW I 2).

Wolff, Christian. 1721. “[Review of] Vernünfftige Gedancken von der Menschen Thun und Lassen […] editae a Christiano Wolfio […].” Acta Eruditorum (Januar): 36–46 (repr. in Wolff 2001, vol. III, 1185–95).

Wolff, Christian. 1722. “[Review of] Allerhand nützliche Versuche […] Autore Christiano Wolfio […] Tomus I.” Acta Eruditorum (Januar): 31–6 (repr. in Wolff 2001, vol. III, 1263–68).

Wolff, Christian. 1723a. “[Review of] De differentia nexus rerum sapientis et fatalis necessitatis […] luculenta commentatio […] Autore Christiano Wolfio […]. Monitum ad commentationem istam […] Autore eodem […].” Acta Eruditorum (November): 510–18 (repr. in Wolff 2001, vol. III: 1414–22).

Wolff, Christian. 1723b. “[Review of] Vernünfftige Gedancken von den Würckungen der Natur […] Autore Christiano Wolfio […].” Acta Eruditorum (October): 468–72 (repr. in Wolff 2001, vol. III, 1409–13).

Wolff, Christian. 1724a. Anmerckungen über die vernünfftigen Gedancken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen, auch allen Dingen überhaupt. Frankfurt: Andreä (repr. of the 1740 ed. in GW I 3).

Wolff, Christian. 1724b. “[Review of] Anmerckungen über die vernünfftigen Gedancken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen […] Autore Christiano Wolfio […].” Acta Eruditorum (July): 310–20 (repr. in Wolff 2001, vol. III, 1478–88).

Wolff, Christian. 1728a. Philosophia rationalis sive Logica, methodo scientifica pertractata. Frankfurt and Leipzig: Renger (repr. of the 1740 ed. in GW II 1.1–1.3).

Wolff, Christian. 1728b. “[Review of] Ludovici Philippi Thummigii […], Meletemata varii et rarioris argumenti in unum volumen collecta […].” Acta Eruditorum (March): 129–33 (repr. in Wolff 2001, 1780–84).

Wolff, Christian. 1728c. “[Review of] Philosophia rationalis, sive logica, methodo scientifica pertractata […] Autore Christiano Wolfio […].” Acta Eruditorum (October): 455–68 (repr. in Wolff 2001, vol. IV, 1791–1804).

Wolff, Christian. 1730a. Cogitationes rationales de viribus intellectus humani earumque usu legitimo in veritatis cognitione. Frankfurt and Leipzig: Renger (repr. of the 1740 ed. in GW II 2).

Wolff, Christian. 1730b. Philosophia prima, sive ontologia, methodo scientifica pertractata. Frankfurt and Leipzig: Renger (repr. of the 1736 ed. in GW II 3).

Wolff, Christian. 1730c. “[Review of] Hieronymi Rorarii, Quod animalia bruta saepe ratione utantur melius homine, libri duo: quos recensuit, Dissertatione de anima brutorum, annotationibusque auxit Georg. Heinr. Ribovius.” Acta Eruditorum (April): 173–77 (repr. in Wolff 2001, vol. IV, 1927–31).

Wolff, Christian. 1730d. “[Review of] Philosophia prima, sive ontologia, methodo scientifica pertractata […] Autore Christiano Wolfio […].” Acta Eruditorum (February): 73–86 (repr. in Wolff 2001, vol. IV, 1903–16).

Wolff, Christian. 1731a. Cosmologia generalis methodo scientifica pertractata. Frankfurt and Leipzig: Renger (repr. of the 1737 ed. in GW II 4).

Wolff, Christian. 1731b. “[Review of] Jura de pacto hereditario renunciativo filiae nobilis a dissensu Doctorum liberata, et methodo demonstrativa in concordiam reducta a Johanne Ulrico Cramero […] cum Praefatione Christiani Wolfii […].” Acta Eruditorum (September): 411–15 (repr. in Wolff 2001, vol. IV, 2037–41).

Wolff, Christian. 1732. Psychologia empirica methodo scientifica pertractata. Frankfurt and Leipzig: Renger (repr. of the 1738 ed. in GW II 5).

Wolff, Christian. 1734. Psychologia rationalis methodo scientifica pertractata. Frankfurt and Leipzig: Renger (repr. of the 1740 ed. in GW II 6).

Wolff, Christian. 1755. Meletemata mathematico-philosophica. Halle: Renger (repr. in GW II 35).

Wolff, Christian. 2001. Sämtliche Rezensionen in den Acta Eruditorum (1705–1731), hrsg. von H. A. Laeven und L. J. M. Laeven-Aretz, 5 vols. Hildesheim: Olms (GW II 38.1–38.5).

Matteo Favaretti Camposampiero matteo.favaretti@unive.it, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy, 0000-0002-7276-9244

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Matteo Favaretti Camposampiero, Christian Wolff’s Reviews of His Own Books, © Author(s), CC BY 4.0, DOI 10.36253/979-12-215-0999-1.07, in Pasquale Terracciano, Francesco Valerio Tommasi (edited by), Philosophical Reviews in German Territories (1668-1799). Volume 2, pp. -102, 2026, published by Firenze University Press, ISBN 979-12-215-0999-1, DOI 10.36253/979-12-215-0999-1