Frederick C. Beiser, one of the leading scholars of German Idealism, is a Professor of Philosophy at Syracuse University. Prior to joining Syracuse, he was a faculty at Indiana University, Bloomington. His first book, The Fate of Reason: from Kant to Fichte (Harvard, 1988) proved widely influential in revising the commonly held, but notorious accounts of German Idealism. In this book, Beiser sought to reconstruct the background of German Idealism through the narration of the the story of the Spinoza or Atheism controversy. In the process, a great many figures, whose importance was hardly recognized by the English speaking philosophers, were given their proper due.