Herder's Essay on Being

<p>In recent years Johann Gottfried Herder has been the focus of much interest in the English-speaking world. While he was long disregarded current scholarship in both German and English is revisiting his importance as an early theorist of the limits of Enlightenment. Increasingly scholarship is remembering that in the closing decades of the eighteenth century Herder was one of the most important alternative voices to Kant.</p><p><br />Herder's <em>Versuch über das Sein</em> (Essay on Being ca. 1764) was likely composed in reaction to Kant's lectures on metaphysics. In it Herder unfolds his philosophical project setting the terms that remained the foundation of his work throughout his life and influenced Hegel Nietzsche Heidegger and others. Given the central importance of the essay and Herder's increasing recognition in the English-speaking world it is striking that it has not been translated into English until now. This volume presents a facsimile of the manuscript along with a German transcription an annotated translation and critical essays by the most important Herder scholars writing in German and English today.</p><p>Contributors: Manfred Baum Arnd Bohm Nigel DeSouza Ulrich Gaier Alexander J. B. Hampton Marion Heinz John K. Noyes Wolfgang Pross Sonia Sikka.</p><p>John K. Noyes is Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto and Extraordinary Professor at Stellenbosch University South Africa. He is the author of <em>Herder: Aesthetics against Imperialism.</em></p>