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Eckart Förster and Yitzhak Y. Melamed, editors. Spinoza and German Idealism. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. xii + 285. Cloth, $99.00.
It turns out that you can teach an old dog-even a "dead dog," as Lessing would describe Spinoza-new tricks. In Spinoza and German Idealism, we learn not only how Spinoza influenced the German Idealists, but also how they transformed and gave new life to the key concepts of his system. In this collection of fourteen essays, we see how Kant, Schleiermacher, Herder, Goethe, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Trendelenburg understood (and misunderstood) Spinoza's conception of God, intellectual intuition, human freedom, and the relation between the infinite and the finite-to name but a few of the topics treated in these pages-and also how they defined their own philosophical projects in response to Spinoza on those points. The breadth of ideas covered in this volume alone make it worthy of attention, and given that they have been so seldom studied in connection with German Idealism, this is an important reference text for scholars in the field.
Much could be said about each of the essays here, but for the purpose of this review I will keep to some highlights. In pieces that serve to bookend the collection, Michael Della Rocca and Don Garrett take up Spinoza's philosophical position as it...