Electrifying when they were first delivered in 1973, becoming legendary in the years since, as transcripts passed from hand to hand, Dieter Henrich's lectures on German idealism were the first contact a major German philosopher had made with an American audience since the onset of World War II. They remain, to this day, one of the most eloquent interpretations of the central philosophical tradition of Germany and the way in which it relates to the concerns of contemporary philosophy. Thanks to the editorial work of David Pacini, one of the original auditors of Henrich's course, the lectures appear here with annotations that link them to the editions of the masterworks of German philosophy as they are now available.

Henrich describes the movement that led from Kant to Hegel, beginning with an interpretation of the structure and tensions of Kant's system. He locates the Kantian movement and revival of Spinoza, as sketched by F. H. Jacobi, in the intellectual conditions of the time and in the philosophical motivations of modern thought. And he explains the motives behind Fichte's Doctrine of Science. Henrich connects this history to the poet Hölderlin's original philosophy and to the thought of the founders of Romanticism, Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel. He concludes with an interpretation of the basic design of Hegel's system.