Debates, Controversies, and Prizes

Tinca Prunea-Bretonnet is Researcher at the Institute of Philosophy and Psychology of the Romanian Academy and at the University of Bucharest, Romania.Christian Leduc is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Montreal, Canada.

• Acknowledgments Introduction- Tinca Prunea-Bretonnet and Christian Leduc Part One: Natural Law and History1. The Presumption of Goodness and the Controversy over Christian Wolff ’s Cosmopolitanism- Andreas Blank2. The Duties of the Historian—Raynal’s Failed Prize Question-Gesa Wellmann Part Two: Metaphysics3. A Negative Monadology: Condillac’s Answer to the Berlin Academy Prize Competition- Christian Leduc 4. Between Optimism and Anti-Optimism: Prémontval’s “Middle Point”- Lloyd Strickland 5. The Public Debate about the Abuse of Power by the Berlin Academy against Samuel König- Ursula Goldenbaum 6. On Progress in Metaphysics: Responses to the Berlin Academy’s 1792/1795 Prize Essay Question- Stephen Howard and Pavel ReichlPart Three: Anthropology7. Aesthetics as Apolaustic: Baumgarten and the Controversy over Sensitive Pleasures- Alessandro Nannini 8. Drives, Inclinations, and Perfectibility: Leonhard Cochius’ Response to the 1768 Prize Question- Tinca Prunea-Bretonnet 9. The Origin of Language as an Anthropological Topic: The 1769/1771 Prize Question of the Berlin Academy- Gualtiero Lorini 10. The Philosophical Context of the 1773/1775 Preisfrage: Johann Georg Sulzer on Knowledge and Sensibility- Daniel Dumouchel Note on the Contributors Index

This collection opens up for us the stunning scope and quality of the philosophical debates that arose around the prize essay competitions of the Berlin Academy in mid-eighteenth-century Prussia. In doing so, it reveals the extent to which philosophical controversy in general was a major driving force of the early German Enlightenment.