 Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700–66) was born in Königsberg and studied philosophy there.  He began teaching philosophy there in 1723, but fled the Prussian draft the next year and settled in the Saxon city of Leipzig, where Leibniz had earlier studied. Leipzig is only thirty kilometers away from Halle, the Prussian city where Wolff had been teaching for two decades; but Wolff had been driven from Halle in 1722 by the reaction to his argument that the “atheistic” Chinese could arrive at the same moral truths as Christian Europeans by the use of human reason alone. So Gottsched may never have met Wolff. Nevertheless, he had already been exposed to Wolffian philosophy in Königsberg, and his two-volume Erste Gründe der gesamten Weltweisheit (“First Principles of all Philosophy,” 1733–34), which includes an extensive review of natural science as well as logic, metaphysics, and ethics, became the most widely adopted textbook of Wolffian philosophy. However, although he eventually held the professorship in logic and metaphysics in Leipzig, Gottsched was also the professor of poetry, and by far the greatest part of his boundless energy was devoted to literature and philology. In the history of aesthetics, his reputation rests on his Versuch einer critischen Dichtkunst vor die Deutschen (“Essay toward a Critical Poetics for the Germans,” 1730, with further editions in 1737, 1742, and 1751).