 A. G. Baumgarten is best known for authoring the textbook in metaphysics that Kant used for his lectures on the topic, though he was an important and innovative thinker in his own right. His philosophical ambitions are, moreover, deeply informed by the controversy in Halle, as he had an abiding intellectual sympathy with Wolffianism but theological and personal connections to the Pietists. Among his students was the notable Wolffian philosopher Georg Friedrich Meier (1717–77), and his own influence extended to Kant but also to Moses Mendelssohn and J. G. Herder.