ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Crusius’s stance on experience, experiments, and observation in view of his response to both earlier Thomasians and Wolff. As Heßbrüggen-Walter explains, Rüdiger, Syrbius, and Budde considered experience to consist in multiple sensations of the same object, whereas Hofmann and Crusius held that experiences are first and foremost propositions in which the nexus between subject and predicate is based on sensations. According to Heßbrüggen-Walter, this change in perspective was occasioned by Hofmann’s critique of Wolff’s understanding of truth in the latter’s Philosophia rationalis sive Logica. Drawing on this contextualization, the chapter argues that Crusius’s analysis of the concept of experience in Entwurf der nothwendigen Vernunft-Wahrheiten (1745) mostly follows his teachers Rüdiger and Hofmann. Like them, he focuses on the role of experience in scientific investigations and, accordingly, moves away from the radical Pietist wing of Thomasianism.
