This Handbook is a collection of essays that explore, in unprecedented detail, the ideas, developments, and key figures across the entire scope of 18th-century German philosophy.
The contributions to this Handbook serve as a collective rebuttal of the widespread sentiment that there is little of interest in 18th-century German philosophy between Leibniz and Kant. In its chapters, the reader will naturally find new insights into the Kantian philosophy and its context, particularly on the topics of philosophical method, metaphysics, the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of mathematics. More than this, however, the reader will be introduced to aspects of eighteenth-century German philosophy that do not cohere to, and even challenge, the Kantian historical narrative. A number of chapters, for instance, reveal the profound inadequacy of the division of thinkers in this period into camps of “rationalists” and “empiricists” by documenting the innovative methodologies, the variations within each philosophical tradition and school, and the enduring appeal of philosophical eclecticism. Other chapters take issue with the notion that there was but a single Enlightenment, with Kant as its figurehead, contending in addition for a religious Enlightenment (particularly through the Pietist movement) and tracing the distinctive intellectual contours of the Jewish Enlightenment. Still other chapters document the important contributions of women in the period, particularly to aesthetics and to the philosophy of education, in addition to accounting for their continued absence from the influential histories of philosophy produced in Germany in the latter half of the century. There is, accordingly, a great deal to interest us in German philosophy in the eighteenth century after Leibniz and apart from Kant.
Corey W. Dyck is Professor of Philosophy at Western University. Among his most recent books are Wolff and the First Fifty Years of German Metaphysics (OUP, 2024), the collection Women and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Germany (OUP, 2020), and Early Modern German Philosophy (1690-1750) (OUP, 2019). He has held visiting positions at the University of Oxford, the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, and at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, where he was also an Alexander von Humboldt research fellow.
Frederick C. Beiser was born and raised in the USA. He studied in the UK at Oriel College and Wolfson College, Oxford, and then in Germany for many years, receiving stipends from the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung and the Humboldt Stiftung during that time. He has taught in many universities in the USA including Yale, Harvard, Penn, Wisconsin, Colorado, and Indiana. In 2015 President Joachim Gauck awarded him the Bundesverdienstkreuz (the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany) for his work on German philosophy. Beiser was Professor of Philosphy at Syracuse University for 22 years until he retired in 2022.
Brandon C. Look is a University Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Kentucky. Educated at the University of Chicago, where he received his BA, MA and PhD, he has received grants and fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is the author of Leibniz and the ''Vinculum Substantiale'', editor of the The Bloomsbury Companion to Leibniz and co-editor and co-translator (with Donald Rutherford) of The Leibniz-Des Bosses Correspondence for the Yale Leibniz series. In addition, he has published numerous essays on the history of early modern philosophy.
