The first book that presents key original texts from the modern German philosophical tradition to English-language students and scholars of German, with introductions, commentaries, and annotations that make them accessible.
German-language thinkers such as Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud are central to modernity. Yet their reception in the English-speaking world has largely depended on translations, a situation that has often hampered full engagement with the rhetorical and philosophical complexity of the German history of ideas. The present volume, the first of its kind, is a response to this situation. After an introduction charting the remarkable flowering of German-language thought since the eighteenth century, it offers extracts — in the original German — from sixteen major philosophical texts, with extensive introductions and annotations in English. All extracts are carefully chosen to introduce the individual thinkers while allowing the reader to pursue broader themes such as the fate of reason or the history of modern selfhood. The book offers students and scholars of German a complement to linguistic, historical, and literary study by giving them access to the wealth of German-language philosophy. It represents a new way into the work of a succession of thinkers who have defined modern philosophy and thus remain of crucial relevance today.
The philosophers: Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Georg Lukács, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Jürgen Habermas.
Henk de Berg is Professor of German at the University of Sheffield. Duncan Large is Professor of European Literature and Translation at the University of East Anglia.
Table of Content
Introduction: German Thought since Kant
‘Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?’ (1784, Kant)
Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Vorrede zur zweiten Auflage (1787, Kant)
Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (1821, Hegel)
Das Wesen des Christentums (1841, Feuerbach)
Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, vol. 2: ‘Von der Nichtigkeit und dem Leiden des Lebens’ (1844, Schopenhauer)
‘Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie. Einleitung’ (1844, Marx)
‘Thesen über Feuerbach’ (1845, Marx)
Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie. Vorwort (1859, Marx)
Götzen-Dämmerung oder Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophiert (1889, Nietzsche)
Über Psychoanalyse (1910, Freud)
Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (1930, Freud)
Sein und Zeit (1927, Heidegger)
Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (1939, Benjamin)
‘Einführung in die ästhetischen Schriften von Marx und Engels’ (1946, Lukács)
Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente (1944/47, Horkheimer and Adorno))
‘Die Moderne — ein unvollendetes Projekt’ (1980, Habermas)
About the author
HENK DE BERG is Professor of German at the University of Sheffield. He has authored a book for Camden House (Freud’s Theory and Its Use in Literary and Cultural Studies, 2002, pb 2004) and co-edited two (Modern German Thought, 2012, and Tzvetan Todorov, 2020).
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