The 18th century was also known as the Pedagogical Century. In 1774, Dessau saw philanthropists founding the first reformed school dedicated to the principles of the Enlightenment. The philanthropists revolutionised teaching by designing a child-centred learning strategy. They no longer wished to impart the learning of scholars but to provide practical vocational knowledge for future citizens. All subsequent movements for educational reform in Germany referred to this first comprehensive experimental school developed by the educationalists of the German Enlightenment.

Research on the subject to date has largely interpreted the paradigmatic shift in late-Enlightenment anthropology (approx. 1750-1800) as a unified process, and has discussed the various fields of study in isolation. The present volume takes a different course. It insists on the close connection between constructivist and subject-related logic in anthropology, and interprets it in terms of a process of increasing differentiation within the contest between the rival views of man as a physical and moral animal. The various articles discuss the following topics and/or interpretive procedures: the relationship between soma and pneuma; the self-generation of man in the process of natural history; anthropology and the genesis of civilization; empiricism as an anthropological form of epistemology; anthropology and utopia; fictional anthropology as an epistemological approach; philosophy, science, and myth.

In various disciplines, the idea of a 'history of concepts' sparked off innovative research processes after 1945. By contrast, the subject of 'language and the law' harks back to a much older tradition. With reference to the Age of Enlightenment the present volume tests the appositeness of these two approaches by applying them to a number of different issues: problems of terminology in Wolff, Mendelssohn and Kant; the emergence of special languages in Leibniz; legal language and lexicography; the (linguistic) treatment of minorities; legal writing and hermeneutics in the 18th century; enlightened tendencies in legal language; literary transpositions of legal terminologies. The volume sets out to achieve a synthesis between methodological innovation and concrete analysis of source material.

Unlike the globetrotter and revolutionary Georg Forster (1754-1794), Forster as an author and theoretician of perception and description is altogether less well-known. The volume brings together studies on various categories of Forster's work examined for the light they cast on the question of the acquisition of 'reality' by way of 'experience', 'intelligence', 'ideas', 'images' and 'total impressions' and taking place in the tensions obtaining between perception and the construction of possibility. Concrete text analysis and a determination of the effects intended by the author and the methods he employed as a 'social writer' present Forster in a new light.