biography
| name: |
Herder, Johann Gottfried von
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1744–1803)
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| biography:
| Critic and poet, born in Mohrungen, Germany. He studied at Königsberg, and there made the acquaintance of Kant. He was a teacher and pastor in Riga (1764–9), and met Goethe in Strasbourg (1769). He was appointed court preacher at Bückeburg (1770), and first preacher in Weimar (1776). His love for the songs of the people, for unsophisticated human nature, found expression in Volkslieder (1778–9, Folk Songs), a treatise on the influence of poetry on manners (1778), in oriental mythological tales, in parables and legends, in his version of the Cid (1805), and in several other works. The supreme importance of the historical method is recognized in a work on the origin of language (1772), and especially in his masterpiece, Ideen zur Geschichte der Menschheit (1784–91, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man), which is remarkable for its anticipations of evolutionary theories. He is best remembered for the influence he exerted on Goethe and the growing German Romanticism. |
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