Frederick Charles Beiser^[1] (/ˈbaɪzər/; born November 27, 1949) is an American philosopher who is professor emeritus ofphilosophy atSyracuse University. He is best-known for his work onGerman idealism and has also written on theGerman Romantics and 19th-centuryBritish philosophy.

Beiser was born on November 27, 1949, inAlbert Lea,Minnesota. In 1971, Beiser received abachelor's degree fromShimer College, aGreat Books college then located inMount Carroll,Illinois.^[2][3] He then studied at theOriel College of theUniversity of Oxford, where he received aBachelor of Arts degree inphilosophy, politics and economics in 1974.^[1] He subsequently studied at theLondon School of Economics and Political Science from 1974 to 1975.^[1] Beiser earned hisDoctor of Philosophy (DPhil) degree inphilosophy atWolfson College, Oxford, in 1980, under the direction ofCharles Taylor andIsaiah Berlin.^[1] His doctoral thesis was titledThe Spirit of the Phenomenology: Hegel's Resurrection of Metaphysics in the Phänomenologie des Geistes.^[4]

After receiving his DPhil in 1980, Beiser moved to West Germany, where he was a Thyssen Research Fellow at theFree University of Berlin. He returned to the United States four years later.^[5] He joined theUniversity of Pennsylvania's faculty in 1984, staying there until 1985. He then spent the springs of 1986 and 1987 at theUniversity of Wisconsin–Madison andUniversity of Colorado Boulder, respectively.

In 1988, Beiser moved again to West Germany, where he was a Humboldt Research Fellow at the Free University of Berlin. He returned to the United States in 1990 to take up a professorship atIndiana University Bloomington, where he remained until 2001. During his tenure at Indiana, he spent time teaching atYale University. He joinedSyracuse University in 2001, where he is now emeritus. He also taught atHarvard University during the spring of 2002.^[6]

He received aGuggenheim Fellowship for his research in 1994,^[7] and was awarded theOrder of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2015.^[8]

In 1987, Beiser released his first book,The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Harvard University Press). In the 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 work won theThomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize for best first book.^[9] He has since edited twoCambridge anthologies on Hegel,The Cambridge Companion to Hegel (1993) andThe Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy (2008), and written a number of books on German philosophy and the English Enlightenment. He also editedThe Early Political Writings of the German Romantics (Cambridge University Press) in 1996.

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.^[10]

• 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.
• 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.
• Hermann Cohen: An Intellectual Biography. Oxford University Press. 2018.
• David Friedrich Strauß, Father of Unbelief: An Intellectual Biography. Oxford University Press. 2020.
• Johann Friedrich Herbart: Grandfather of Analytic Philosophy. Oxford University Press. 2022
• Philosophy of Life: German Lebensphilosophie 1870–1920. Oxford University Press. 2023.
• The Berlin Antisemitism Controversy. Routledge. 2024.
• Early German Positivism. Oxford University Press. 2025.

• 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.

• "Diotima's Child", an interview in3:16 Magazine, first published 2012-09-21.

• 1949 births
• Living people
• Alumni of the University of Oxford
• Alumni of the London School of Economics
• American expatriates in Germany
• Harvard University Department of Philosophy faculty
• Indiana University faculty
• Philosophers from Colorado
• Philosophers from Connecticut
• Philosophers from Indiana
• Philosophers from Massachusetts
• Shimer College alumni
• Syracuse University faculty
• University of Colorado Boulder faculty
• Yale University faculty
• Recipients of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
• Hegel scholars

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