German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781-1801

frederick c. beiser

One of the very few accounts in English of German idealism, this ambitious work advances and revises our understanding of both the history and the thought of the classical period of German philosophy. As he traces the structure and evolution of idealism as a doctrine, Frederick Beiser exposes a strong objective, or realist, strain running from Kant to Hegel and identifies the crucial role of the early romantics—Hölderlin, Schlegel, and Novalis—as the founders of absolute idealism.

Genres philosophyhistorynonfictiongermanygerman literaturemetaphysicsromanticism

752 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1,2002

Literary awards

international napoleonic society literary award,

This edition

Format: 752 pages, Hardcover
Published: June 10, 2002 by Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674007697
ASIN: 0674007697
Language: English

About the author

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 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 University. Beiser earned his DPhil. degree from Oxford University under the direction of Charles Taylor and Isaiah Berlin.

Beiser's first book, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Harvard, 1987) was 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 Pantheism controversy. Consequently, a great many figures, whose importance was hardly recognized by the English speaking philosophers, were given their proper due.
Beiser has also written on the German Romantics and 19th century British philosophy.