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Starting with the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart, the book addresses the philosophical changes brought about by Luthers reformation, and then presents a detailed account of the classical age of German philosophy, including the work of Leibniz and Kant; the rise of a new form of humanities in Lessing, Hamann, Herder, and Schiller; the early Romantics; and the Idealists Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. The following chapters investigate the collapse of the German synthesis in Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzsche. Turning to the twentieth-century, the book explores the rise of analytical philosophy in Frege and the Vienna and Berlin circles; the foundation of the historical sciences in Neo-Kantianism and Dilthey; Husserls phenomenology and its radical alteration by Heidegger; the Nazi philosophers Gehlen and Schmitt; and the main West German philosophers, including Gadamer, Jonas, and those of the two Frankfurt schools. Arguing that there was a distinctive German philosophical tradition from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, the book closes by examining why that tradition largely ended in the decades after World War II.

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"After the publication of Martin Heideggers Black Notebooks it is more necessary than ever to take stock of German philosophy since the eighteenth century. How is light and shadow distributed, seen from our current standpoint? Which intellectual highroads and byroads lead further--and which ones lead to dead ends or even abysses? Such an inventory is now available. . . . Vittorio Hösles book A Short History of German Philosophy consists, like each of his works, of an exciting mixture of analysis and polemic."--Die Zeit

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Vittorio Hösle is a German-American philosopher and the Paul Kimball Professor of Arts and Letters at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of many books, including Morals and Politics, God as Reason, and The Philosophical Dialogue.

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