Philosophical Academic Programs of the German Enlightenment

The literary genre of academic programs (orationes programmaticae, Pro- grammschriften, Einladungssschriften) defines itself on the basis of the following requirements: they were (1) connected with a course; (2) printed on one or more (also in fractions of half) signatures in quarto or in octavo; and (3) distributed unbound free of charge at the expenses of the profes- sor.1 To date, German eighteenth-century academic programs have not been made the subject of scientific investigations due to the difficulty of providing a strict definition of the genre. As a rule, their contents were enticing and hyperbolic, given the professor's aim of gaining the benevo- lence of the students by condescending to their reasoning abilities. Most importantly, professors felt free to express themselves on issues they might not have gone into in fully fledged treatises.2 We are talking about texts that are mostly very little known, although we can identify as academic programs a number of famous writings by Wolff, Kant, and Fichte which gather new light by being put into a fully unexpected context.