 The controversy between Wolff and his Pietist colleagues is not typically held to be of much philosophical significance. Rather, the Pietists’ hostility towards Wolff is taken to be a reflection of their fundamentally un-enlightened anti-intellectualism, and the outbreak of the controversy itself a result of personal and professional rivalries—competition for students and university chairs. That this appraisal is generally accepted is to no small extent due to the efforts of subsequent histories of the dispute written by devoted Wolffians, such as C. G. Ludovici (1707–78) and Georg Volckmar Hartmann (fl. 1729–1737). And while it cannot be denied that the voluminous texts exchanged during the course of the controversy, on both sides, only infrequently rise above the level of the polemical, it would be unfair to dismiss the ground of the Pietists’ objections as philosophically insignificant, or indeed irrelevant for the subsequent development of German philosophy (up to and including Kant).