Kristin Gjesdal is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Temple University. She works in the areas of German Idealism, phenomenology, and hermeneutics. Her work has appeared in journals such as Kant-Studien, Hegel-Studien, Journal of the History of Philosophy, History of Philosophy Quarterly, and British Journal of the History of Philosophy. Her book Gadamer and the Legacy of German Idealism appeared with Cambridge University Press in 2009.

No period of history has been richer in philosophical discoveries than Germany during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And while it was the eighteenth century that saw Germany attain maturity in the discipline (above all in the works of Immanuel Kant), it was arguably the nineteenth century that bore the greatest philosophical fruits. This Handbook provides a comprehensive introduction to the philosophy of nineteenth-century Germany that will be helpful to readers of very different sorts, all the way from laymen to undergraduates to experts. The volume is divided into four parts. The first Part explores individual philosophers, including Fichte, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, amongst other great thinkers of the period. The second addresses key philosophical movements: Idealism, Romanticism, Neo-Kantianism, and Existentialism. The essays in the third Part engage with different areas of philosophy that received particular attention at this time, including philosophy of nature and of science, philosophy of mind and language, the philosophy of education, and the relationship between philosophy and science, or Wissenschaft (a German term that is famously less narrowly restricted to natural science and disciplines modeled on it than its English counterpart). Finally, the contributors turn to discuss central philosophical topics, from skepticism to materialism, from dialectics to ideas of historical and cultural Otherness, and from the reception of antiquity to atheism. Nineteenth-century German philosophy made important contributions to virtually all areas of philosophy that are still distinguished in academic philosophy departments today. Written by a team of leading experts, The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century is the first collective critical study of this great period in intellectual history. It will be an essential resource for anyone working in the area, and will lead the direction of future research.