The German Idealism Reader is a comprehensive account of the key ideas and arguments central to German idealists and their immediate critics. Expanding the scope beyond the four best-known representatives - Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel - and including those thinkers often considered as secondary, but who are also crucial for understanding of this period, the Reader presents an influential era in all its philosophical complexity.

Through its broad coverage of philosophers and their texts, it offers a complete dynamic picture of the intellectual period and features:
- Selections from key texts by Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel
- Readings from Reinhold, Schiller, Maimon, Schulze, Jacobi, Hölderlin, and Novalis
- Responses to and critiques of German idealist thought by late nineteenth century thinkers, such as Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche
- Selections extending beyond the typical focus on epistemology and metaphysics to include ethics, religion, society, and art
- A general introduction and timeline, together with a chronology and bibliography to each thinker and introductory overviews to both thinkers and text

With readings carefully selected to illustrate thinkers in dialogue with each other, The German Idealism Reader provides a better appreciation of the philosophical discussions central to the period. This is essential reading for all students of German idealism and the nineteenth-century German and Continental philosophies, as well as to those studying the important movements and periods of European intellectual history.