Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew who Gave Us ModernityPart of the Jewish Encounter series In 1656, Amsterdam's Jewish community excommunicated Baruch Spinoza, and, at the age of twenty-three, he became the most famous heretic in Judaism. He was already germinating a secularist challenge to religion that would be as radical as it was original. He went on to produce one of the most ambitious systems in the history of Western philosophy, so ahead of its time that scientists today, from string theorists to neurobiologists, count themselves among Spinoza's progeny. In Betraying Spinoza, Rebecca Goldstein sets out to rediscover the flesh-and-blood man often hidden beneath the veneer of rigorous rationality, and to crack the mystery of the breach between the philosopher and his Jewish past. Goldstein argues that the trauma of the Inquisition' s persecution of its forced Jewish converts plays itself out in Spinoza's philosophy. The excommunicated Spinoza, no less than his excommunicators, was responding to Europe' s first experiment with racial anti-Semitism. Here is a Spinoza both hauntingly emblematic and deeply human, both heretic and hero--a surprisingly contemporary figure ripe for our own uncertain age. |
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Page 48
... fact . Never had there been quite so ambitious a metaphysical project as Spinoza's . He is auda- cious in the claims he makes for pure reason . Logic alone , he argues , is sufficient to reveal the very fabric of reality . In fact ...
... fact . Never had there been quite so ambitious a metaphysical project as Spinoza's . He is auda- cious in the claims he makes for pure reason . Logic alone , he argues , is sufficient to reveal the very fabric of reality . In fact ...
Page 57
... facts have explanations . For every fact that is true , there is a reason why it is true . There simply cannot be , for Spinoza , the inexplicably given , a fact which is a fact for no other reason than that it is a fact . In other ...
... facts have explanations . For every fact that is true , there is a reason why it is true . There simply cannot be , for Spinoza , the inexplicably given , a fact which is a fact for no other reason than that it is a fact . In other ...
Page 180
... facts : the fact of one's identity . To be this thing is to be interested in this thing in a way unduplicated by my interests in other things , as vivid as these may be . And nothing else can explain this special interest in myself that ...
... facts : the fact of one's identity . To be this thing is to be interested in this thing in a way unduplicated by my interests in other things , as vivid as these may be . And nothing else can explain this special interest in myself that ...
Contents
Baruch Bento Benedictus | 3 |
In Search of Baruch | 17 |
The Project of Escape | 67 |
Copyright | |
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