Johann Gottfried von Herder
German philosopher, theologian, poet and literary critic (1744–1803), born in Mohrungen, East Prussia, a student in Königsberg both of Kant, from whom he absorbed philosophical rigour, and of Johann Georg Hamann, from whom he inherited a profound sensitivity to language, history and the irreducibility of concrete experience against Enlightenment rationalist abstraction. A central figure often regarded as a founder of the Sturm und Drang movement and a direct precursor of German Romanticism, Herder developed throughout his work a profound critique of the abstract universalism of the French Enlightenment, arguing instead that every people or nation (Volk) possesses a distinctive, unrepeatable cultural character — its Volksgeist or 'spirit of the people' — most authentically expressed in its vernacular language, folklore and popular poetry, and that no civilisation or historical stage can legitimately be judged by another's universal values, a fundamental principle that makes him one of the intellectual fathers of modern cultural relativism and philosophical anthropology. This valuing of cultural and linguistic diversity led him to compile Folk Songs (1778–1779), a pioneering anthology of popular poetry from multiple European nations that exerted decisive influence on the birth of Romantic cultural nationalism across Europe. His masterwork, Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Humanity (1784–1791), proposes a non-teleological, non-Eurocentric philosophy of history that interprets human development as an organic diversity of cultures, each with its own intrinsic value and centre of gravity, in direct contrast to the later Hegelian philosophy of history, more systematic but also more homogenising. Herder also exerted decisive influence on modern linguistics through his Treatise on the Origin of Language (1772), where he argued that language is not a divine gift but a capacity naturally developed by human reason itself, a work awarded by the Prussian Academy of Sciences that marked a turning point in the philosophy of language.