John H. Smith is a Professor of German at the University of California, Irvine. He has published monographs on Hegel and philosophies of the will. He has essays on a range of literary and philosophical topics, most recently on Goethe and Idealism, on Nietzsche and the decadent will, and on Ereignis in Heidegger and the Novelle. His latest book is Dialogues between Faith and Reason: The Death and Return of God in Modern German Thought. He is currently working on a project entitled “How Infinity Came to Be at Home in the World,” which explores the place of the infinitesimal calculus and the mathematical infinite in the German philosophical tradition. And he is coeditor of the Goethe-Lexicon of Philosophical Concepts.