Immortal Animals, Subtle Bodies, or Separated Souls: The Afterlife in Leibniz, Wolff, and Their Followers

In eighteenth-century post-Leibnizian German philosophy, the debate on immortality did not concern only the fate of the soul after death but also the fate of the body. Leibniz had famously maintained that no animal ever dies, for the soul is never entirely deprived of its living body. In spite of Bilfinger’s almost isolated defense, this doctrine never became dominant, even among Leibniz’s followers. Christian Wolff, long considered a mere popularizer of Leibniz’s philosophy, departed from this account of immortality and replaced it with the traditional Platonic model, based on the survival of separated souls. After reconstructing Leibniz’s, Wolff’s, and Bilfinger’s positions, this paper considers how the debate evolved within the so-called Wolffian school during the 1730s and 1740s. Both partisans and detractors of separated souls diverged from Leibniz on a crucial point: namely, they argued that another key Leibnizian doctrine, pre-established harmony, entails that the soul need not be forever united to its body. Furthermore, the cases of Johann Heinrich Winckler, Johann Gustav Reinbeck, Israel Gottlieb Canz, and even Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten show that the post-Leibnizian detractors of separated souls drew, in fact, more inspiration from the neo-Platonic and esoteric doctrine of the subtle body than from Leibniz’s original immortalism.