Abstract

Shortly after he was banished for heresy from his nation-state of Prussia in 1723, Christian Wolff published an overview of his philosophical system, known in English as the Preliminary Discourse [1728]. In the last chapter of this work, Wolff gives an extended argument for the importance and necessity of academic freedom. In the paper, I reconstruct and evaluate Wolff’s argument and maintain that the strength of Wolff’s view resides in his naïve optimism for intellectual discourse