The volume comprises selections from the major work of Kant, Schopenhauer, and Hegel, as well as from Fichte and Schelling, some of whose writings are translated here for the first time. The volume comprises selections from the major work of Kant, Schopenhauer, and Hegel, as well as from Fichte and Schelling, some of whose writings are translated here for the first time. It thus provides a much fuller context for the German Idealist movement than has been hitherto available in any comparable form in English. The texts reveal aesthetic philosophy and literary criticism not as abstract of peripheral disciplines but as absolutely central topics in the mainstream of German Idealist thought. Dr Simpson's introduction places the writers and their work in an appropriate intellectual context, and his extensive annotation seeks to clarify and render more accessible their complex and often elusive ideas.