François Hemsterhuis and the Writing of Philosophy

Resets the scholarship on the philosophical practice and style of François Hemsterhuis

Only the second ever English-language monograph devoted to Hemsterhuis’ philosophy and the first for 45 years.

Feeds into an upsurge of interest in Hemsterhuis around celebrations of the tricentenary of his birth and the publication of the first ever English translations of his writings by EUP.

Makes substantial use of the recently published complete edition of Hemsterhuis’ correspondence.

Focuses on Hemsterhuis’ uses of myth, dialogue and imagery in his late dialogues which were so influential on the later Idealists and Romantics, including Novalis and the Schlegels.

François Hemsterhuis (1721-1790) was the most significant Dutch philosopher after Spinoza. Daniel Whistler argues that Hemsterhuis’ philosophy matters and that its exclusion from the canon of modern philosophy has been unjust. This is not just because of its reception history - its influence on later German thinkers, such as Goethe, Hamann, Hegel, Herder, Hölderlin, Jean Paul, Kant, Jacobi, Novalis, Schelling, the Schlegels, Schleiermacher, Wieland - but is primarily because Hemsterhuis’ philosophy contains a rich assemblage of ideas and philosophical practices.

Whistler looks specifically at Hemsterhuis’ reflections on philosophical style and the strategies he employs to communicate ideas in his late dialogues. Taking seriously Hemsterhuis’ newly-published complete correspondence as a significant philosophical text, he contends that Hemsterhuis deserves to be placed alongside Shaftesbury, Hamann, Friedrich Schlegel, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche as one of the preeminent philosophical stylists of modernity.