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 187
... imagination , which , for Spinoza , includes all the pas- sively received data of the senses , devoid as they are of ... imaginative and the veridically perceptual is no consequen- tial distinction at all . ) In intuitive knowledge , the ...
... imagination , which , for Spinoza , includes all the pas- sively received data of the senses , devoid as they are of ... imaginative and the veridically perceptual is no consequen- tial distinction at all . ) In intuitive knowledge , the ...
Page 193
... imaginations , ' would convince his contemporaries to give him a clean bill of theo- logical health so that he might ... imagination is engaged . The sense of his boyhood world , in certain ways quite similar to my girlhood world , rises ...
... imaginations , ' would convince his contemporaries to give him a clean bill of theo- logical health so that he might ... imagination is engaged . The sense of his boyhood world , in certain ways quite similar to my girlhood world , rises ...
Page 196
... imagination fares no worse than does perception . But then imagination fares no better than perception , either . Both are placed together on the lowest rung of the intellectual and ethical progression that the mind must make in its ...
... imagination fares no worse than does perception . But then imagination fares no better than perception , either . Both are placed together on the lowest rung of the intellectual and ethical progression that the mind must make in its ...
Contents
Baruch Bento Benedictus | 3 |
In Search of Baruch | 17 |
The Project of Escape | 67 |
Copyright | |
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