This is a very useful and inspiring history of modern German philosophy. The book is as lucid as a celebrated philosopher as Alberto Jori can make it. The object of the work is the development of German philosophy from the last decades of the eighteenth century, and in particular from Kant, to Nietzsche, that is to the end of the nineteenth century. Within just over a century, a prodigious and almost frenetic speculative process took place in Germany, the fulcrum of which was the attempt to build a new metaphysics, which could ensure, in its framework, the ontological foundation of man's freedom. From the Kantian noumenon to the various forms of German Idealism, to arrive - through Schopenhauer's annulment of the will, the revolution prophesied by Marx, or Kierkegaard's "leap" - up to the Nietzschean Übermensch, all the thinkers who are examined in this book sought to guarantee the self-determination of man, and his superiority over nature, by resorting to new ontological-metaphysical categories. The balance of these daring speculative experiments is, on the whole, bankrupt. Classical metaphysics has not been superseded by these thinkers, but has instead shown its own validity.