7. Herder’s The Oldest Document of the Human Race and his Philosophy of Religion and History

Portrait of Johann Gottfried Herder by Gerhard von Kügelgen (1809), oil on canvas, Tartu University Library, Photograph by Trzęsacz (2018), Wikimedia, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Herder_by_K%C3%BCgelgen.jpg A perplexing feature of Herder’s Älteste Urkunde des Menschengeschlechts (The Oldest Document of the Human Race) of 1774–76 is its fundamental ambivalence regarding the legitimacy of natural and supernatural modes of explanation. On the one hand, he deni.