 Wolff’s influence on German philosophy is manifold and profound. Through his textbooks and his “martyrdom” for the cause of Enlightenment, he succeeded in placing modern philosophical ideas at the forefront of German academic debate. Moreover, since he was among the first to publish philosophical texts in German, Wolff had a formative role in establishing German itself as a philosophical language. Wolff’s philosophy gained an ascendant position in the German academy as a result of his own (seemingly tireless) defense of his ideas as well as through his many students and sympathizers, including Georg Bernhard Bilfinger (1693–1750), Ludwig Philipp Thümmig (1697–1728), F. Chr. Baumeister (1709–85), A. G. Baumgarten (1714–62), G. F. Meier (1718–77), and J. C. Gottsched (1700–66). Among his more prominent adherents and (sometime) admirers, Wolff could count Voltaire, Émilie du Châtelet, Moses Mendelssohn, Frederick the Great (who had a hand in translating one of his works), and Catherine the Great (who offered him a pension). Kant, who himself owed much to Wolff for both the form and content of his philosophy, would later recognize him in the Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason as “the greatest of all dogmatic philosophers” (B xxxvi).