Secunda et adversa fortuna: Wolff and Meier on the Moral Relevance of Good Fortune and Misfortune

The paper focuses on a central topic in 18th-century German philosophy, precisely on the meaning of fortune and misfortune within God’s government of the world, thus on the role they play in orienting moral actions. Since the debate is relatively wide the paper discusses a specific episode, that is the criticism raised by Georg Friedrich Meier in the early 1750s against a common view that goes back to Wolff's statements in his ethical work. I will argue that their divergent opinions concerning the possibility to consider fortune and misfortune as proper means in God’s government of the world, that is as rewards or punishments of human actions, reveal an underestimated divergence in the way they present the task and the role of philosophy, in a formula a different self-understanding of the Aufklärung.