I am particularly gratified to see the completion of a long and difficult project with the appearance of this collection of essays. Even in our age of instant electronic communication, philosophical texts continue to present persistent problems for the ongoing task of hermeneutic appropriation. Despite all difficulties, Terence Moore at Cambridge University Press has always remained committed to the task of making these essays on the philosophy of German Idealism available in English translation. Robert Pippin, the editor of the Modern European Philosophy series, has also encouraged the project, and I am most grateful for his friendly assistance throughout. I would also like to express my appreciation to Terry Pinkard for his moral and intellectual support.

Above all, I am indebted to the translator, Nicholas Walker, who has undertaken the painstaking and challenging task of appropriate linguistic adaptation and transformation. I feel that the English translation has effectively succeeded in both capturing the thought and reflecting the style of the original essays. To reproduce a specific argument faithfully within the appropriate conceptual framework, and to present it without distortion in another language at once so close to and so remote from German, is no mean achievement.

These considerations are broadly practical in character. But I would also like to make a further point in this connection.