Sebastian Gardner on Omri Boehm’s “Kant’s Critique of Spinoza”

Omri Boehm offers a lucid and incisive defence, supported by careful scholarship, of the compelling idea that preoccupation with Spinoza—appreciation of the force of Spinoza’s reasoning along with a concern to avoid his drastic conclusions—is at the heart of Kant’s philosophical enterprise. I have learned a great deal from Boehm’s fascinating study, and its excellence will be clearly visible to anyone who has pursued the question of what the Critique of Pure Reason is aiming to achieve. Since a full engagement with all of the themes treated in the book is out of the question, I am going to focus (in Sections 1 and 2) on Boehm’s treatment of the pre-Critical work in which, he argues, Spinozism first becomes a major issue for Kant, and then (in Section 3) say a few things about Boehm’s general account of Kant’s confrontation with Spinoza and indicate how his configuration of the KantSpinoza opposition sets the stage for a later chapter in the development of classical German philosophy.