The Great Spinoza Controversy of the 1780s: The Role of Frans Hemsterhuis (1721–1790)

This article studies the role of the leading Dutch philosopher of the second half of the eighteenth century, Frans Hemsterhuis (1721–90) in the so-called ‘Pantheismusstreit’, the major intellectual controversy that erupted in Germany and seized the attention of all the leading German thinkers of the day in the mid- and late 1780s. While acknowledging that most accounts of the great Spinoza controversy of the 1780s in Germany make little room for Hemsterhuis, this piece argues that actually Hemsterhuis’s Platonic, anti-Christian form of deism played a rather significant role in the furore and seeks to explain the relevance and attraction of Hemsterhuis’s thought from the perspective of the leading German participants in the controversy.