Includes bibliographical references and index.

Front Matter -- Copyright page -- Acknowledgments -- The Exception of the Dutch Enlightenment -- Bayle’s Scepticism Revisited -- Bayle and Erasmus: the Politics of Appropriation -- Bayle’s Presence in the Dutch Republic -- Justus van Effen on Reason and Virtue -- Dutch Cartesianism and the Advent of Newtonianism -- The Waning of the Radical Enlightenment and the Rise of Dutch Newtonianism -- The Return of Rationalism -- Frans Hemsterhuis: the Philosopher as Escape Artist -- The Batavian Revolution -- Tolerating Turks? Perceptions of Islam in the Dutch Republic -- The Rise and Fall of Dutch Cosmopolitanism -- Eighteenth-Century Censorship of Philosophy -- Spinoza’s Life: 1677–1802 -- Back Matter -- Bibliography -- Index.

This book is an attempt to assess the part played by philosophy in the eighteenth-century Dutch Enlightenment. Following Bayle’s death and the demise of the radical Enlightenment, Dutch philosophers soon embraced Newtonianism and by the second half of the century Wolffianism also started to spread among Dutch academics. Once the Republic started to crumble, Dutch enlightened discourse took a political turn, but with the exception of Frans Hemsterhuis, who chose to ignore the political crisis, it failed to produce original philosophers. By the end of the century, the majority of Dutch philosophers typically refused to embrace Kant’s transcendental project as well as his cosmopolitanism. Instead, early nineteenth-century Dutch professors of philosophy preferred to cultivate their joint admiration for the Ancients.