There can be little doubt that without Spinoza, German Idealism would have been just as impossible as it would have been without Kant. Yet the precise nature of Spinoza’s influence on the German Idealists has hardly been studied in detail.
This volume of essays by leading scholars sheds light on how the appropriation of Spinoza by Fichte, Schelling and Hegel grew out of the reception of his philosophy by, among others, Lessing, Mendelssohn, Jacobi, Herder, Goethe, Schleiermacher, Maimon and, of course, Kant. The volume thus not only illuminates the history of Spinoza’s thought, but also initiates a genuine philosophical dialogue between the ideas of Spinoza and those of the German Idealists.
The issues at stake – the value of humanity; the possibility and importance of self-negation; the nature and value of reason and imagination; human freedom; teleology; intuitive knowledge; the nature of God – remain of the highest philosophical importance today.
Table of Contents
1 Rationalism, idealism, monism, and beyond by Michael Della Rocca
2 Kant’s idea of the unconditioned and Spinoza’s: the fourth Antinomy and the Ideal of Pure Reason by Omri Boehm
3 “The question is whether a purely apparent person is possible” by Karl Ameriks
4 Herder and Spinoza by Michael N. Forster
5 Goethe’s Spinozism by Eckart Förster
6 Fichte on the consciousness of Spinoza’s God by Johannes Haag
7 Fichte on freedom: the Spinozistic background by Allen Wood
8 Spinoza in Schelling’s early conception of intellectual intuition by Dalia Nassar
9 Schelling’s philosophy of identity and Spinoza’s Ethica more geometrico by Michael Vater
10 “Omnis determinatio est negatio”: determination, negation, and self-negation in Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel by Yitzhak Y. Melamed
11 h ought and metaphysics: Hegel’s critical reception of Spinoza by Dean Moyar
12 Two models of metaphysical inferentialism: Spinoza and Hegel by Gunnar Hindrichs
13 Trendelenburg and Spinoza by Frederick Beiser
14 A reply on Spinoza’s behalf by Don Garrett
Simon Gros 
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