  Originally appointed to teach mathematics at the Pietist-dominated university of Halle, Wolff was inspired by both the mathematical and philosophical genius of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), but published a vast systematic statement of a philosophy that was constructed partly although by no means wholly on Leibnizian lines in a way that Leibniz himself never did. Wolff’s collected works (over thirty volumes in German and forty in Latin) include German versions of his logic, metaphysics, ethics, political philosophy, and teleology as well as a four-volume encyclopedia of mathematical subjects. In addition, there are expanded Latin versions of the logic, the components of metaphysics including ontology, rational cosmology, empirical psychology, rational psychology, and natural psychology, as well as another four-volume mathematical compendium, seven volumes on ethics, and no fewer than twelve volumes on political philosophy and economics. In all of this vast output, the only thing that might look like a work specifically in aesthetics is a treatise on architecture included in his encyclopedia of mathematics. That very placement indicates that Wolff regarded the discussion of architecture as part of the theory of science; and in the Preliminary Discourse on Philosophy in General that prefaces his Latin restatement of his system, Wolff states more generally that a “philosophy of the arts” is possible, but as part of “technics or technology,” “the science of the arts and of the works of art” (Wolff, Preliminary Discourse, §71, p. 38). Here Wolff uses the term “art” (ars) in the ancient sense of techne, which means any form of craft requiring both aptitude and training, rather than in the specifically modern sense of “fine art.” In his German works, Wolff uses the word Kunst in the same broad way. Even with regard to something closer to the fine arts, however, he says that “There could also be a philosophy of the liberal arts, if they were reduced to the form of a science….one might talk about rhetorical philosophy, poetical philosophy, etc.” (ibid., §72, p. 39). Wolff certainly does not have the idea of the fine arts as a domain of human production and response that differs in some essential way from all other forms of human production and response, thus he does not have the idea of aesthetics as a discipline that will focus on what distinguishes the fine arts and our response to them from everything else.  Nevertheless, in the course of his works he introduces some ideas about both the fine arts and our response to them that will be seminal for the next half-century of German thought.