Abstract

The literary genre of academic programs (orationes programmaticae, Programmschriften, Einladungssschriften) defines itself on the basis of the following requirements: they were (1) connected with a course; (2) printed on quarto or octavo signatures; and (3) distributed unbound free of charge at the expenses of the professor. 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 provocative and hyperbolic, given the professor’s aim of gaining the benevolence 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. We are talking about texts that are mostly very little known, although we can identify as academic programs a number of renown writings by Wolff, Kant, Fichte, and Herbart, which gather new light by being put into a fully unexpected context.