The Meaning of Truth (selected)

Rudolf Christoph Eucken was a German Idealist philosopher who mounted a vigorous intellectual response to the materialism and positivism dominating late nineteenth-century thought. His earnest pursuit of truth and idealist philosophical vision earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1908, though his work has since largely faded from mainstream philosophical attention.

Writing during the Wilhelmine era in Germany, Eucken's idealist philosophy emerged as a direct counter to the scientific materialism and mechanistic worldview that had come to dominate European intellectual life. His work reflected the broader cultural anxieties of a rapidly industrializing Germany grappling with questions of spiritual meaning in an increasingly secular age.