By Kant

Wolff's use of mathematics usually made the best impression on those who knew the least mathematics. During the late 1740s, in a celebrated dispute between the supporters of Newton and those of Wolff, Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis was the main adversary of the Wolffians. The most telling attack on Wolff came from Kant, however, who as usual went right to the core and challenged the mathematical method itself.

The Berlin Academy had posed the question of whether metaphysical truth could be equated with mathematical truth and, if it could not, what sort of truth it then was. Kant replied with the treatise, Untersuchung über die Deutlichkeit der Gründsätze der natürlichen Theologie und der Moral (1762, published in 1764), which struck a decisive blow to Wolff's philosophical teachings.^[33]

Kant had been influenced by Wolff's philosophy, but had never

followed it slavishly. The treatise of 1762 marked his rejection of the mathematical ideal in philosophy. In it Kant draws his well-known distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions, and concludes that metaphysics is not synthetic like mathematics but rather analytic. The synthetic structures of mathematics cannot be transferred to philosophy and its "mathematical method," for philosophy, unlike mathematics, does not have at its disposal definitions and axioms from which to proceed methodically. Application of the mathematical method to the field of philosophy had thus given rise to errors and mistakes: no dogma in philosophy could be likened to the definitions and axioms of mathematics.

Kant's criticism swept away the very foundations of Wolff's influence. Wolff's mathematical method depended on the possibility of applying procedures of mathematical proof to all philosophical and theological questions. Now Kant argued that the basic structures of mathematics and philosophy were different. Wolff's system crumbled.^[34]

Several conclusions emerge. Wolffian thinking became a fashionable philosophy in the first half of the 18th century, and its exponents and detractors both saw the mathematical method as the essential element of his doctrine. It is important to distinguish between form and content in our analysis of the Wolffian mathematical method, and to recognize that Wolff's philosophy fulfilled different functions in different situations. While "rationalism" and "mathematical method" were popular rhetorical flourishes in the 18th century, they also stood for a well-defined means of attaining certain intellectual objectives. Both friends and enemies of the Enlightenment appropriated that method, since mathematics as a method of proof promised results in all areas of human knowledge. That it collapsed so readily under Kant's attack reflected that Wolff's mathematical method had already proved inadequate: it failed to provide tools for revamping critical philosophy, or for creating instrumentalist science, or for solving practical problems facing the bureaucratic states of the late 18th century. The form and content of mathematics itself, however, would continue to speak to these needs.