Abstract

Wolff develops a reinterpretation of the philosophical categories of traditional practical philosophy in order to adapt its content to the requirements of modern thought. Both rationality, that must infer goodness understood as the object of behaviour, and desire, that motivates human behaviour, are for Wolff already newly defined through the categories provided by the philosophy of the seventeenth century. In order to save the content of the ethics of goodlife, Wolff develops a rationally-foundet theory of motivation that then from Kant onwards was used to combat traditional ethics. The relevance of Wolff's practical philosophy does not so much consist in that it revives and updates philosophical categories of an old tradition whose demise seemed inevitable with the appearance of the modern period. It consists much more in that Wolff's practical philosophy unites two epochs which, following him, can no longer be conceived without difficulty in a coherent theory of practice. By means of a positive reference to Hobbes, Descartes and Leibniz, Wolff arrives at a solution - in keeping with the requirements of modern philosophy - of the Aristotelian problem of how goodness may be comprehended as real and achievable by humans