This updated edition offers a comprehensive, penetrating, and informative guide to what is regarded as the classical period of German philosophy. Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling are all discussed in detail, along with contemporaries such as Hölderlin, Novalis, and Schopenhauer, whose influence was considerable but whose work is less well known in the English-speaking world. Leading scholars trace and explore the unifying themes of German Idealism and discuss its relationship to Romanticism, the Enlightenment, and the culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. This second edition offers an updated bibliography and includes three entirely new chapters, which address aesthetic reflection and human nature, the chemical revolution after Kant, and organism and system in German Idealism. The result is an illuminating overview of a rich and complex philosophical movement, and will appeal to a wide range of interested readers in philosophy, literature, theology, German studies, and the history of ideas.

'Each of the already strong existing essays has been updated to reflect the most recent scholarship in the growing field of German idealism and early German Romanticism. The historical arc is most impressive, from Kant and Hegel to often-neglected figures such as Hamann, Herder, Hölderlin, Jacobi, Maimon, Novalis, Reinhold, and Schopenhauer. Ameriks’s collection is indispensable for all scholars of the period.'

E. Millán Source: Choice