 During his Parisian sojourn Humboldt met and had contact with the foremost French politicians, scholars and intellectuals of the period such as Sieyès, Tracy, Roederer, Garat, Cabanis, Degérando, La Romiguière, Dupont de Nemours, Benjamin Constant and Madame de Staël whose literary salon he frequented. He attended meetings of the Institut National (as the Academie Française was called then) and debated Kantian philosophy with the leading French philosophers (GS Vol 14: 483–87), visited the theater regularly, and from a cultural anthropologist’s point of view, he observed and analyzed its different forms and varieties from the Comédie Française and the Théatre de la République to the Vaudeville. Meanwhile he studied and commented upon effectively the entire canon of classical and modern,—i.e., eighteenth century—French literature and philosophy, for example Rousseau, Diderot and Madame de Staël. His comments on these writers and his astute critique of the philosophy of Condillac and his followers found in his Parisian diaries offer important clues for an understanding of his own philosophical position. Goethe meanwhile published two essays by him on French theater and art in his journal Die Propyläen. Humboldt’s Parisian diaries reveal the extraordinary scope and intensity of his involvement with the complex cultural, social, political and cultural life-world of France under the Directoire (GS Vol 14: 361–643; Vol 15:  1–46).[1]