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.

"This collection brings together a series of cutting-edge studies on the most significant controversies and prize essay contests of the German Enlightenment. Chapters address questions such as the condition of possibility of the debates, their institutional support and their aims, and introduce relatively unknown but key figures of the period. Set out into four parts, the essays provide new material on areas such as anthropology, the problem of language, colonialism and the origins of aesthetics for the wider study of 18th-century intellectual and philosophical life"--

Acknowledgments
Introduction- Tinca Prunea-Bretonnet and Christian Leduc
Part One: Natural Law and History
1. The Presumption of Goodness and the Controversy over Christian Wolff 's Cosmopolitanism- Andreas Blank
2. The Duties of the Historian-Raynal's Failed Prize Question-Gesa Wellmann
Part Two: Metaphysics
3. 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 Reichl
Part Three: Anthropology
7. 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