Introduction

Summary

Herder is a philosopher of the very first rank. Such a claim depends mainly on the intrinsic quality of his ideas, and I shall attempt to give a sense of that in what follows. But another aspect of it is his intellectual influence. This has been immense both within philosophy and beyond (far greater than is generally realized). For example, Hegel's philosophy turns out to be an elaborate systematic extension of Herderian ideas (especially concerning God, the mind, and history); so too does Schleiermacher's (concerning God, the mind, interpretation, translation, and art); Nietzsche is strongly influenced by Herder (concerning the mind, history, and morals); so too is Dilthey (in his theory of the human sciences); J. S. Mill has important debts to Herder (in political philosophy); Goethe not only received his philosophical outlook from Herder but was also transformed from being merely a clever but conventional poet into a great artist mainly through the early impact on him of Herder's ideas; and this list could go on.

Indeed, Herder can claim to have virtually established whole disciplines which we nowadays take for granted. For example, it was mainly Herder (not, as is often claimed, Hamann) who established certain fundamental principles concerning an intimate dependence of thought on language which underpin modern philosophy of language. Through those ideas, his broad empirical approach to languages, his recognition of deep variations in language and thought across historical periods and cultures, and in other ways, Herder inspired Wilhelm von Humboldt to found modern linguistics.