Review Essay—Review of Omri Boehm’s Kant’s Critique of Spinoza, by Eric Schliesser
Eric Schliesser reviews Omri Boehm’s Kant’s Critique of Spinoza, published by Oxford University Press (2014).
Eric Schliesser’s analysis of Omri Boehm’s latest work, Kant’s Critique of Spinoza, is both critical and complementary. Boehm’s work is distinctive in that it offers an interpretive twist on the usual approach to Kant studies: whereas most scholars focus on Kant’s philosophy as a response to Hume or Leibniz, Boehm rigorously contends that Kant’s work is symptomatic of a long and deeply influential concern with Spinozistic thought, even before the outbreak of the Pantheismusstreit. While offering certain critical evaluations, Schliesser supports Boehm’s arguments by reinforcing the importance of placing Kant in a wider eighteenth-century context not limited to purely German sources. To further pave the way for such research, Schliesser attentively brings his own insight to the central arguments of Boehm’s book.
Article available through Philosophy Documentation Center, here.
Eric Schliesser is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Amsterdam and is currently also Visiting Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences at Ghent University. His research interests encompass seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy and its relationships with the sciences, moral philosophy, and political economy. Schliesser has edited or co-edited a number of essay collections including most recently, Sympathy: A History (Oxford University Press, 2015), Philosophy and Its History (Oxford University Press, 2013), and Interpreting Newton (Cambridge University Press, 2012). He has also published a number of articles such as, “On Reading Newton as An Epicurean: Kant, Spinozism and the Changes to the Principia,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science (2013), and “Spinoza and the Philosophy of Science: Mathematics, Motion, and Being,” Oxford Handbook of Spinoza (forthcoming).
Eric Schliesser, review of Kant’s Critique of Spinoza, by Omri Boehm, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 36:2 (2015), pp. 463–83.