Il tardo Illuminismo e la critica dei saperi. Introduzione

The introductory essay justifies the choice of a topic that cuts across German-language literature of the Late Enlightenment and early 19th century, aesthetics and modern history. The linchpin of the examination is the role that Goethe and Herder played in conveying different knowledge and the reconstruction of the cultural climate in Weimar in the late 18th and early 19th century. The essays presented in this volume do not limit themselves to a debate within the aesthetic-literary sphere in the German cultural basin, but cross-cut the idea of ‘taste’ in eighteenth-century Europe. What emerges from these pages is the relationship between intellect and imagination, between sensibility and faculty of judgement, between art and science, between education and knowledge and, always, between cultural models of the past and projects aimed at developing a new ‘science of man’.