Johann Georg Hamann is a seminal figure in the development of modern German literature and philosophy. To many generations of cultural historians and students of German literature he has been known as the "father" of the Sturm und Drang and a principal forerunner of the Romantic movement. His influence on German Idealism was also consiserable, even though much of it rested upon a misunderstanding of his true intentions. Through the mediation of Johann Gottfried Herder, Hamann became a major influence on the young Johann Wolfgang Goethe. That was to last, to varying degrees, throughout Goethe's long life. Other contemporaries who felt his impact as a religious thinker were Theodor Gottlieb Hippel, Johann Kaspar Lavater, Matthias Claudius, and, above, all, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. Even Immanuel Kant, Hamann's friendly adversary, owed much to him, since it was Hamann who called Kant's attention to the empiricist philosophy of David Hume and...