 Yet quite to the contrary of the whiggish philosophical histories Kant’s success inspired (and continues to inspire), the German-speaking lands of Europe in the period before Kant were host to a rich intellectual milieu. It was of course the homeland of Leibniz, whose contributions to the flourishing of intellectual culture include his sparse publications but also his fruitful efforts to found a German learned society and his support of forward-thinking philosophers for university positions, thereby accelerating Germany’s transition into the era of Enlightenment. German academic philosophers were thoroughly influenced by Leibniz’s thought, but their creative appropriations of it resulted in innovations such as the invention of the disciplines of aesthetics and empirical psychology. Germany was also the site of vigorous and publicly-enacted intellectual disputes, such as that at the new university in Halle where the libertas philosophandi itself came under threat but was ultimately (if not immediately) vindicated. Outside of the academic context, radical philosophical thinking circulated underground in clandestine texts that linked Germany with the current of ideas flowing through the rest of Europe and Britain. It was, moreover, a period in the history of philosophy in which women and other under-represented thinkers contributed in integral ways to the conception, propagation, and refinement of modern ideas and to the expansion of the Enlightenment. In short, this is a vibrant period in the history of philosophy that is eminently worthy of study, even apart from its relation—whether as a foil or as a crucible—to the great philosopher of Königsberg.