 Kant undoubtedly casts a long shadow in the history of eighteenth century German philosophy. Not only did he initiate a revolution in philosophy, but in the course of doing so he thoroughly exposed the metaphysical systems of his predecessors as rationalistic castles in the air. This latter, negative part of his project was in fact so successful that the pre-Kantian period of German philosophy is widely viewed, even today, as a period of benighted dogmatism. During this time, German philosophy, such as it was, is thought to be preoccupied with the sort of dry scholasticism and hidebound metaphysics that had long since been superseded in Britain and France, a circumstance reflected in the fact that nearly all intellectuals of note were university professors—male, of course, as women could not attend university—who published lengthy academic tomes (and even lectured) in Latin rather than the vernacular. Indeed, isolated from the rest of Europe by enduring confessional tensions and the convolutions of internal politics, the German-speaking lands that constituted the Holy Roman Empire might seem like a sort of intellectual island, a bulwark against the advance of modern philosophical innovations and a place from which few ideas of note ever emanated, not, that is, until the advent of the Kantian philosophy.