Chapter 16 examines the drawings that Goethe produced throughout his life and places his work in its art-historical context. Over the course of the eighteenth century, drawing had come to be seen as an essential artistic technique; Goethe received instruction in drawing in his early years, and from that time on, he drew wherever he was. The chapter analyses the evolution of his work and the shifting influences on it: Dutch art played an important early role, and the inspiration that he received in Italy, including from contemporaries based there, was crucial.

Chapter 2 introduces the two places which were the most significant in Goethe’s life: Frankfurt, the city of his birth, and Weimar, the duchy where he lived from the age of twenty-six. The chapter explains the differing political weight of Frankfurt and Weimar – Frankfurt being the nearest that the Holy Roman Empire had to a capital city, Weimar being altogether more provincial, though nonetheless the capital of one of the more important ‘old principalities’. Moreover, it sets the two places in the context of the upheavals of the time, examining, for example, Weimar’s shifting geopolitical allegiances during and after the Napoleonic era.

This essay recounts the life and death of Prince Johann Ernst of Saxe-Weimar (1696–1715) on the basis of previously unexamined archival documents. The Prince was a gifted musician who played a significant role in the careers of both Johann Sebastian Bach and Georg Philipp Telemann. Evidence presented here for the first time reveals that Telemann was a particularly important presence during the Prince’s final year. The bond they forged during this difficult time led the Prince to entrust Telemann with the publication of concertos he had composed as a youth but which were reconceived in light of his illness as a kind of musical testament.

This chapter unpacks the dense statement that Kierkegaard gives of his ontology of the self at the start of The Sickness unto Death. It considers the claims that the self is a synthesis of factors that stand in tension with one another (the finite and the infinite, etc.); that it is not simply a relation but a dynamic, continuing process of relating to itself; that it is only able to be this because it relates to another (God); and that selfhood, so considered, is a goal which human beings fall short of attaining. Throughout, Kierkegaard’s thought is explicated by comparison and contrast with other philosophical accounts of the self, referring to Descartes, Locke, Fichte, Heidegger, Sartre and Frankfurt; and the continuing relevance of Kierkegaard’s account to recent discussions of selfhood, the relation of the self or person to the human being, and the extent to which the self can be thought of as self-constituted is emphasized.

In his Autobiography, John Stuart Mill asserts that in 1813 he read ‘the first six dialogues (in the common arrangement) of Plato, from the Euthyphro to the Theaetetus inclusive’ (he was then seven years old; he means the Greek text). What was ‘the common arrangement’? In which edition of the text did Mill encounter it? Indeed, which editions did his father James Mill possess, and which is the one he would have chosen for his son’s introduction to Plato and Platonic Greek? The Thrasyllan arrangement familiar to modern readers from Burnet’s Oxford Text was anything but common or usual in earlier centuries. The only credible candidate is the one pioneered in Serranus’ edition of 1578, printed by Stephanus and then adopted widely, whose pagination has remained the standard Plato reference system. The Stephanus order is found in the complete Bipont Plato edition of 1781-87, whose volumes James Mill gradually acquired. Though it cannot be proved that he possessed in 1813 its opening volumes, containing the dialogues John Stuart read, these are a much likelier choice than the far less readily legible 1602 Frankfurt edition, which he almost certainly owned by that date.