Frederick C. Beiser

Frederick C. Beiser, one of the leading scholars of German Idealism, is a Professor of Philosophy at Syracuse University. Prior to joining Syracuse, he was a faculty at Indiana University, Bloomington. His first book, The Fate of Reason: from Kant to Fichte (Harvard, 1988) proved widely influential in revising the commonly held, but notorious accounts of German Idealism. In this book, Beiser sought to reconstruct the background of German Idealism through the narration of the story of the Spinoza or Atheism controversy. In the process, a great many figures, whose importance was hardly recognized by the English speaking philosophers, were given their proper due.

Works

Monographs:

• The Fate of Reason: From Kant to Fichte (Harvard,1988)
• Enlightenment, Romanticism and Revolution: The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought, 1790–1800 (Harvard,1992)
• The Sovereignty of Reason: The Defense of Rationality in Early English Enlightenment (Princeton,1996)
• German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781–1801 (Harvard,2002)
• The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism (Harvard,2003)
• Schiller as Philosopher (Oxford,2005. To be published in December 2005)

Edited Works:

• The Cambridge Companion to Hegel (Cambridge,1996)
• The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics (Cambridge,1996)