Ploucquet, Gottfried

Gottried Plouqcuet is known as a precursor of symbolic logic and as a philosopher connected to occasionalism. Born in Stuttgart on 25 August 1716, he studied there at the Ducal Gymnasium. In 1732 he was granted a scholarship to study at the theological seminary of the University of Tübingen. While studying Wolff’s mathematical writings Ploucquet found his way to philosophy. During his whole life, he never separated philosophy from mathematics. Having come to philosophy through the foyer of mathematics, he suffered when the sober form of a system became the victim of a frivolous cover, and he feared that in this way the limits of genuine philosophy were displaced. Israel Gottlieb Canz (1690-1753) instructed him in philosophy and Christoph Matthäus Pfaff (1686-1760) in theology. In 1734 he became a magister of philosophy and in 1740 doctor of theology. In 1747 he won the prize-question on the monads of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin and in 1749 he was voted external member of that academy, after which came the call to the chair of logic and metaphysics at the University of Tübingen, a position he kept for the rest of his life, with the exception of the Summer Term of 1778, in which he taught at the Military Academy in Stuttgart, where he had among his students also the young Friedrich Schiller. Ploucquet was well acquainted with ancient philosophers, whom he read in the original texts and whose positions he compared with those of the modern, whom he knew just as well. He often referred to older systems, such as those by Leibniz and Wolff, and took much from Descartes, Malebranche, and Locke, while taking critical stances against Robinet, Helvetius, and Kant. When Kant in his Einzigen möglichen Beweisgrund für das Daseyn Gottes of 1763 dealt with the notion of an absolute existence, Ploucquet checked Kant’s work for fallacies and defended against Kant’s criticism the proof based on the idea of a contingent world. Ploucquet died in Tübingen on 13 September 1790, after an ictus he received in 1781 had left him paralyzed. He kept nonetheless absolving at least one of his professorial duties until the end: he dictated the logical and metaphysical theses submitted to the students that took the Magister exam in philosophy at the University of Tübingen. This detail is not without relevance, for when Friedrich Wilhelm Hölderlin and Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel were examined in Tübingen in 1790, they answered questions that had been formulated by Ploucquet. Moreover, it has been shown that Johann Friedrich Flatt and Christoph Bardili, who both taught logic and metaphysics to Hölderlin and Hegel (Flatt as an extraordinary professor at the university, Bardili as a Repetent in the Stift), used for their courses the last edition of Ploucquet’s logic and metaphysics textbook