 Debates about artistic matters were greatly influenced by the new spaces and means of communication that emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Critics expressed their judgments in published treatises and in periodicals such as Le Mercure galant; philosophical ideas were also developed in oral conversations between members of the newly founded royal academies, within elite coteries in private salons, and among men in public cafés. Discussions sometimes even became rowdy in spaces such as the opera house or the theater, which were accessible to people of various social classes and both genders. The increasingly literate public called for the right to make artistic judgments, while intellectuals were only beginning to distinguish themselves as professionals with institutional credentials, so it is impossible to discuss philosophy in isolation from milieu or means of communication in the eighteenth century.