 Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) is most often remembered for his philosophy of history, expounded with relative brevity in his 1774 work This Too a Philosophy of History for the Education of Humanity and at great length in his Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Humanity, published from 1784 to 1791. He is typically read as having advocated cultural relativism and historicism against the universalist pretensions of the Enlightenment—manifested in aesthetics in the search for a universally valid “standard of taste”—and thus as having been a forerunner of Romanticism. Our focus here will be on Herder’s work in aesthetics, which fully occupied him for the first fifteen years of his career, as well as at the very end of his career, when he wrote a vigorous polemic against the aesthetic theory of Kant. In this section we will consider Herder’s early work in aesthetics, while discussion of his later work will be reserved for section 9.