Frederick C. Beiser

Frederick Charles Beiser (/ˈbaɪzər/; born November 27, 1949), one of the leading scholars of German Idealism writing in English, is a Professor of Philosophy at Syracuse University. In addition to his writings on German Idealism, Beiser has also written on the German Romantics and 19th century British philosophy. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his research in 1993 and received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2015.

Education

Beiser received his first bachelor's degree from Shimer College, a Great Books college then located in Mount Carroll, Illinois, in 1971. His second bachelor's was from Oriel College of Oxford University, which he received in 1974. He subsequently studied at the London School of Economics from 1974 to 1975.

Beiser earned his DPhil degree from Wolfson College of Oxford University in 1980, under the direction of Charles Taylor and Isaiah Berlin.

Career

Prior to joining Syracuse in 2001, he was a member of the faculty at Indiana University, Bloomington where he received a 1999-2000 NEH Faculty Fellowship. He has also taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Harvard, and Yale.

Beiser's first book, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Harvard, 1987) cast new light on German Idealism. In this book, Beiser sought to reconstruct the background of German Idealism through the narration of the story of the Spinoza or Pantheism controversy. Consequently, a great many figures, whose importance was hardly recognized by the English speaking philosophers, were given their proper due. The volume won the 1985 Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize for best first book.

Beiser has edited two Cambridge anthologies on Hegel, The Cambridge Companion to Hegel (1993) and The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy (2008).

Beiser is notable amongst English-language scholars for his defense of the metaphysical aspects of German Idealism (e.g. Naturphilosophie), both in their centrality to any historical understanding of German Idealism, as well as their continued relevance to contemporary philosophy.

Works

• The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte, Harvard University Press, (1987)
• Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought, 1790-1800, Harvard University Press, (1992)
• The Sovereignty of Reason: The Defense of Rationality in Early English Enlightenment, Princeton University Press, (1996)
• German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781-1801, Harvard University Press, (2002)
• The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism, Harvard University Press, (2004)
• Schiller as Philosopher: A Re-Examination, Oxford University Press, (2005)
• Hegel, Routledge, (2005)
• Diotima's Children: German Aesthetic Rationalism from Leibniz to Lessing, Oxford University Press, (2009)
• The German Historicist Tradition, Oxford University Press, (2011)
• Late German Idealism: Trendelenburg and Lotze, Oxford University Press, (2013) [A monograph about the life and work of Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg and Hermann Lotze.]
• After Hegel: German Philosophy, 1840–1900, Princeton University Press, (2014)
• The Genesis of Neo-Kantianism, 1796-1880, Oxford University Press, (2014)
• Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860-1900, Oxford University Press, (2016)

• The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, Cambridge University Press, (1996)
• The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics, Cambridge University Press, (1996)
• The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, 2008