Herder, Johann Gottfried (1744–1803)

Herder, Johann Gottfried(1744–1803)

Johann Gottfried Herder, German philosopher and critic, was born in Mohrungen in East Prussia. His father was a schoolteacher and he grew up in humble circumstances. In 1762 he enrolled at the University of Königsberg, where he studied with Kant, who accorded him special privileges due to his unusual intellectual abilities. At this period he also began a lifelong friendship with the irrationalist philosopher Johann Georg Hamann. In 1764 he left Königsberg to take up a schoolteaching position in Riga. There he wrote the programmatic essay How Philosophy Can Become More Universal and Useful for the Benefit of the People (1765); published his first major work, on the philosophy of language and literature, the Fragments on Recent German Literature (1767–1768); and also an important work in aesthetics, the Critical Forests (1769). In 1769 he resigned his position and traveled—first to France, and then to Strasbourg, where he met, and had a powerful impact on, the young Goethe. In 1771 he won a prize from the Berlin Academy for his best-known work in the philosophy of language, the Treatise on the Origin of Language (1772). From 1771 to 1776 he served as court preacher to the ruling house in Bückeburg.

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