Conferences can be exciting affairs. Such was the case with “Hamann and the Tradition,” held at Hunter College, New York, in 2009. This volume testifies to the high caliber of the proceedings, which brought together researchers in diverse disciplines—history, comparative and German literature, religious studies, theology, and philosophy—from Europe and the United States. Lisa Marie Anderson, conference organizer and editor of this volume, is the editor of Hegel on Hamann (Northwestern UP, 2008), which includes her translation of the monograph-size work by Hegel that appeared after the publication of the first edition of Hamann's writings, edited by Friedrich Roth, in 1828.

Those who write about Hamann often begin by referring to his “obscurity” and to “hermeneutical challenges” (6), meaning not simply his rhetorical style but, rather, the difficulty of situating him in the history of ideas. The bibliography, ten pages listing only English-language publications, is evidence that Hamann is not obscure. In addition, the 2008 German-language biography of Hamann by Oswald Bayer, a contributor here, has recently appeared in English (William B. Eerdmans, 2012). To another contributor, Kenneth Haynes, we owe the translation of a selection of Hamann's essays, Hamann: Writings on Philosophy and Language (Cambridge UP, 2007). The supposed obscurity, however, can be used for more ideological purposes. A presence in these pages is Magus of the North: J. G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism (1994) by Isaiah Berlin. Berlin's subtitle tells all, and this volume pushes back against such a view.

The opening section, “Situating Hamann,” traces, first, Hamann's historical positioning and his influence on Kant, Herder, Jacobi, Schelling, Hegel, and Kierkegaard (John Betz) and, second, Hamann's reception in the nineteenth century (Kenneth Haynes). Betz addresses the theological basis of Hamann's obscurity and the transmission of his “metacritical” ideas via Herder and Jacobi to the philosophic “mainstream” (14). Haynes shows how Hamann's failure to fit into either a system or a narrative of the progress of reason and self-realization led to his marginalization in nineteenth-century histories of philosophy. The second section, “Hamann in Dialogue,” contains five essays. These concern Hamann's counter-Enlightenment reading of Socrates (Kelly Dean Jolley) and how his ideas anticipated the thinking of others: Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Ferdinand Ebner (Gwen Griffith-Dickson), Kierkegaard (Stephen Cole Leach), and Nietzsche and Wittgenstein (Jonathan Gray).