Forms of Temporality and Historical Time in the Work of Johann Gottfried Herder

This edited collection is the first volume solely dedicated to research on Johann Gottfried Herder’s understanding of history, time, and temporalities.

Although his ideas on time mark an important transition period that advanced the emergence of the modern world, scholars have rarely addressed Herder’s temporalities. In eight chapters, the volume examines and illuminates Herder’s conception of human freedom in connection with time; the importance of the concept of forces (Kräfte) for a dynamic ontology; human beings’ sensuous experience of inner and external temporality; Herder’s conception of Bildung, speculations on extra-terrestrial beings and on different perceptions of time; the mythological figure Nemesis and Herder’s view of the past and the future; the temporal dimension in Herder’s aesthetics; and Herder’s biblical studies in relationship to divine infinitude and human temporality. The volume concludes by outlining the influence of Herder’s understanding of time on following generations of thinkers.

Forms of Temporality and Historical Time in the Work of Johann Gottfried Herder is ideal for scholars, graduates, and postgraduates interested in Herder’s metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of history, as well as any scholar concerned with eighteenth-century concepts of time and the emergence of the modern world at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Liisa Steinby is Professor emerita of Comparative Literature at the University of Turku. She was the Vice President (2015–2016) and President (2017–2018) of the International Herder Society. Her recent publications include Myth in the Modern Novel (monograph, 2023), the article “Das ‘Bild’ bei Herder” (2023), and the chapter “Approaches to Myth and Mythology” in The Oxford History of Modern German Theology I (2023). She co-edited The Politics of Literary History (2024) and edited Herder and the Nineteenth Century (2020).

Johannes Schmidt is Professor of German at Clemson University. His research and teaching interests include literature and philosophy of the eighteenth century, Herder, Lessing, and Shoah studies. He is the co-editor of the Herder Yearbook (5 volumes, 2014–2022), co-editor of Herder on Empathy and Sympathy (2020), author of a chapter on Herder in the The Palgrave Handbook of German Romantic Philosophy (2020), and author of “‘I do desire no free will’: Lessing’s Peculiar View on Human Freedom” (2019).