 Historically, this misrepresentation of Wolff as an arch-rationalist ignores his liberal borrowings from, and deep engagement with, empiricistic and scientifically-minded thinkers, most notably Locke and Newton. In his capacity as reviewer for the Acta eruditorum, Wolff was intimately familiar with intellectual developments in England—indeed he was brought on by Mencke specifically in order to comment on the mathematical and scientific developments there (for which task Wolff taught himself English over a Summer)—and he wrote approving early reviews of Newton’s Optics and Locke’s Opera posthuma. In general, Wolff took Locke’s “historical, plain method” as a model for his own empirical psychology, and admired the blending of reason and experiment that characterized Newton’s method, even if Wolff was deeply skeptical of Newton’s speculative and metaphysical excursions in the Queries in the Latin edition of the Optics and in the General Scholium of the second edition of the Principia (not to mention the metaphysical views explicitly defended by Samuel Clarke in the correspondence with Leibniz, for the German edition of which Wolff wrote the preface). Even so, Wolff’s importance for the reception of Locke in Germany is currently under-appreciated (vide Fischer 1975), and his contributions to the reception of Newton have only recently been explored in some detail (see Dunlop 2013, Stan 2012).