Empirical Psychology: Between Reason and Experience

In order to understand the relationship between philosophy and experience, Wolff’s Psychologia Empirica (1732) is an extremely important text throughout the history of modern thought. Wolff then speaks of a connubium rationis et experientiae, appealing that both, reason and experience, contribute to the making of knowledge. Hence the references in Wolffian psychological science to astronomy and to a kind of psychometry, in the name of the experimental philosophy that Wolff hopes to extend to every field of knowledge and philosophy. This is a special relationship of philosophy with experience, which is not reduced to a pure empiricism, and which constitutes a fundamental mark of Wolff’s psychological, scientific and philosophical thought. This chapter is intended to contribute to the understanding and further discussion of this subject; first by reconstructing the reasons that lead Wolff to use the term “empirical psychology” and his response to the accusations of the Pietists of Halle. Secondly, with reference to the great Latin Logic, the relationships between historical, mathematical and philosophical knowledge and the typical characteristics of the so-called experimental philosophy are clarified. Hence the constant relationship between a posteriori and a priori that appears clear from Wolff’s typical intertwining between empirical psychology and rational psychology.