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 at Indiana University Bloomington, where he remained until 2001. During his tenure at Indiana, he spent time teaching at Yale University. He joined Syracuse University in 2001, where he is now emeritus. He also taught at Harvard University during the spring of 2002.[6]
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 the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize for best first book.[9] He has since edited two Cambridge anthologies on Hegel, The Cambridge Companion to Hegel (1993) and The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy (2008), and written a number of books on German philosophy and the English Enlightenment. He also edited The 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]
Publications
Authored Books
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.
Edited works
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.
^Forster, Michael N.; Gjesdal, Kristin (2015). The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford University Press. p. 9. ISBN9780199696543.