 Through the efforts of Thomasius, and later Christian Wolff, the Friedrichs-Universität in Halle became the intellectual centre of the early Enlightenment in Germany. And despite, for instance, Thomasius’ conflict with Orthodox Lutheranism in Leipzig, and Wolff’s controversy with his Pietist colleagues  (§3.3,  below), neither were explicitly hostile towards religious belief, the Church, or to (appropriately exercised) religious authority; nor for that matter did either seek to challenge the existing political order. Beyond the German academy, however, a more radical philosophical tradition flourished, one that drew on the thought of, among others, Hobbes, Gassendi, and Spinoza, and proliferated through the transmission of clandestine literature within networks that spanned across Europe. While there was considerable diversity among the views held by the thinkers within this radical philosophical tradition, they tended to be highly critical of organized religion (if not necessarily professed atheists) and of the established political order, rejected the authority of the Bible as a source of revealed truth, and defended a (not always sophisticated) materialistic conception of the soul (cf. Stiehler 1966; Israel 2001: 628–636; Mulsow 2006 [2015]). It bears noting that while this tradition flourished outside of a narrow academic context, there was nonetheless considerable exchange and mutual influence between figures in both the mainstream and radical traditions.