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.

An extensive examination of the profound impact of Spinoza's philosophy on the German Idealists.

Explores the powerful continuing influence of Spinoza's metaphysical thinking in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German philosophy.

Selections usually need no justifications. Some justification, however, of the treatment accorded Spinoza's Ethics may be necessary in this place. The object in taking the Ethics as much as possible out of the geometrical form, was not to improve upon the author's text; it was to give the lay reader a text of Spinoza he would find pleasanter to read and easier to understand. To the practice of popularization, Spinoza, one may confidently feel, would not be averse.

Beth Lord looks at Kant's philosophy in relation to four thinkers who attempted to fuse transcendental idealism with Spinoza's doctrine of immanence. Examining Jacobi, Herder, Maimon and Deleuze, Lord argues that Spinozism is central to the development of Kant's thought, and opens new avenues for understanding Kant's relation to Deleuze.

Schelling and Spinoza reconstructs Schelling's reading of Spinoza's metaphysics to better understand the roles realism and idealism play in Schelling's work. Schelling initially praises Spinoza's monism but comes to criticize the lifelessness produced by Spinoza's dualistic account of the relation between thought and existence. By turning to Schelling's notion of the Absolute, author Benjamin Norris presents a novel reading of Schelling's early and middle philosophical endeavors as a kind of ideal-realism dependent on the hyphen that marks both the identity and the non-identity of realism and idealism. Through close analysis of Schelling's work, he convincingly argues that any contemporary return to Schelling must grapple with his critique of Spinoza. This critique calls into question the categories of immanence and transcendence that orient the current debate surrounding realism, antirealism, and idealism. Schelling and Spinoza is an important contribution to our understanding of both Schelling and Spinoza, as well as the viability of the frightening claim that only one thing truly exists.