Presents the first English translation of Herder's foundational essay along with critical responses to it by today's leading Herder scholars.

New, specially commissioned essays providing an in-depth scholarly introduction to the great thinker of the European Enlightenment. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) is one of the great names of the classical age of German literature. One of the last universalists, he wrote on aesthetics, literary history and theory, historiography, anthropology, psychology, education, and theology; translated and adapted poetry from ancient Greek, English, Italian, even from Persian and Arabic; collected folk songs from around the world; and pioneered a better understanding of non-European cultures.A student of Kant's, he became Goethe's mentor in Strasbourg, and was a mastermind of the Sturm und Drang and a luminary of classical Weimar. But the wide range of Herder's interests and writings, along with his unorthodox ways of seeing things, seems to have prevented him being fully appreciated for any of them. His image has also been clouded by association with political ideologies, the proponents of which ignored the message of Humanität in histexts. So although Herder is acknowledged by scholars to be one of the great thinkers of European Enlightenment, there is no up-to-date, comprehensive introduction to his works in English, a lacuna this book fills with seventeennew, specially commissioned essays. Contributors: Hans Adler, Wulf Koepke, Steven Martinson, Marion Heinz and Heinrich Clairmont, John Zammito, Jürgen Trabant, Stefan Greif, Ulrich Gaier, Karl Menges, Christoph Bultmann, Martin Keßler, Arnd Bohm, Gerhard Sauder, Robert E. Norton, Harro Müller-Michaels, Günter Arnold, Kurt Kloocke, and Ernest A. Menze. Hans Adler is Halls-Bascom Professor of Modern Literature Studies at the Universityof Wisconsin-Madison. Wulf Koepke is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of German, Texas A&M University and recipient of the Medal of the International J. G. Herder Society.

Herder combines rationalist and empiricist thought with a wide range of sources - from the classics to Norse legend, Shakespeare to the Bible - to illuminate the ways we experience sculpture.

Publisher Description

This volume combines Rousseau's essay on the origin of diverse languages with Herder's essay on the genesis of the faculty of speech. Rousseau's essay is important to semiotics and critical theory, as it plays a central role in Jacques Derrida's book Of Grammatology, and both essays are valuable historical and philosophical documents.