Frederick C. Beiser tells the story of the emergence of neo-Kantianism from the late 1790s until the 1880s. He focuses on neo-Kantianism before official or familiar neo-Kantianism, i.e., before the formation of the various schools of neo-Kantianism in the 1880s and 1890s (which included the Marburg school, the Southwestern school, and the Göttingen school). Beiser argues that the source of neo-Kantianism lies in three crucial but neglected figures: Jakob Friedrich Fries,

Frederick C. Beiser was born and raised in the US, and studied in the UK at Oriel and Wolfson Colleges, Oxford. He also studied in Germany and lived in Berlin for many years, receiving stipends from the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung and the Humboldt Stiftung. He has taught in universities across the US, and is currently Professor of Philosophy at Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York. Beiser is the author of Schiller as Philosopher (OUP, 2005), Diotima's Children (OUP, 2009), The German Historicist Tradition (OUP, 2011), and Late German Idealism (OUP, 2013).

• General Introduction: Defining and Re-Examining Neo-Kantianism
• Part I
• Introduction: The Lost Tradition
• 1: Jakob Friedrich Fries and the Birth of Psychologism
• 2: Johann Friedrich Herbart, Neo-Kantian Metaphysician
• 3: Friedrich Eduard Beneke, Neo-Kantian Martyr
• 4: The Interim Years
• Part II
• Introduction: The Coming of Age
• 5: Kuno Fischer, Hegelian Neo-Kantian
• 6: Eduard Zeller, Neo-Kantian Classicist
• 7: Rehabilitating Otto Liebmann
• 8: Jürgen Bona Meyer, Neo-Kantian Skeptic
• 9: Friedrich Albert Lange, Poet and Materialist Manqué
• 10: The Battle against Pessimism
• 11: Encounter with Darwinism
• Part III
• Introduction: The New Establishment
• 12: The Young Hermann Cohen
• 13: Wilhelm Windelband and Normativity
• 14: The Realism of Alois Riehl
• Bibliography I: Primary Sources
• Bibliography II: Secondary Sources