Frederick C. Beiser
American philosopher

Frederick Charles Beiser (; born November 27, 1949) is an American philosopher who is professor emeritus of philosophy at Syracuse University. He is best-known for his work on German idealism and has also written on the German Romantics and 19th-century British philosophy.
Life and career
Beiser was born on November 27, 1949, in Albert Lea, Minnesota. In 1971, Beiser received a bachelor's degree from Shimer College, a Great Books college then located in Mount Carroll, Illinois. He then studied at the Oriel College of the University of Oxford, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy, politics and economics in 1974. He subsequently studied at the London School of Economics and Political Science from 1974 to 1975. Beiser earned his Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) degree in philosophy at Wolfson College, Oxford, in 1980, under the direction of Charles Taylor and Isaiah Berlin. His doctoral thesis was titled The Spirit of the Phenomenology: Hegel's Resurrection of Metaphysics in the Phänomenologie des Geistes.
After receiving his DPhil in 1980, Beiser moved to West Germany, where he was a Thyssen Research Fellow at the Free University of Berlin. He returned to the United States four years later.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5497459. VIAF identifies the subject as 108881799. The Library of Congress control number is n86001323. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1949, 1971, 1974 and 1975.
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