A Book Forged in Hell

A Book Forged in Hell
Author: Steven Nadler
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2011-10-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 069113989X

When it appeared in 1670, Baruch Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise was denounced as the most dangerous book ever published. Religious and secular authorities saw it as a threat to faith, social and political harmony, and everyday morality, and its author was almost universally regarded as a religious subversive and political radical who sought to spread atheism throughout Europe. Steven Nadler tells the story of this book: its radical claims and their background in the philosophical, religious, and political tensions of the Dutch Golden Age, as well as the vitriolic reaction these ideas inspired. A vivid story of incendiary ideas and vicious backlash, A Book Forged in Hell will interest anyone who is curious about the origin of some of our most cherished modern beliefs--Jacket p. [2].

Spinoza Contra Phenomenology

Spinoza Contra Phenomenology
Author: Knox Peden
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 381
Release: 2014-06-04
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0804791368

Spinoza Contra Phenomenology fundamentally recasts the history of postwar French thought, typically presumed to have been driven by a critique of reason indebted to Nietzsche and Heidegger. Although the reception of phenomenology gave rise to many innovative developments in French philosophy, from existentialism to deconstruction, not everyone in France was pleased with this German import. This book recounts how a series of French philosophers used Spinoza to erect a bulwark against the nominally irrationalist tendencies of phenomenology. From its beginnings in the interwar years, this rationalism would prove foundational for Althusser's rethinking of Marxism and Deleuze's ambitious metaphysics. There has been a renewed enthusiasm for Spinozism of late by those who see his work as a kind of neo-vitalism or philosophy of life and affect. Peden counters this trend by tracking a decisive and neglected aspect of Spinoza's philosophy—his rationalism—in a body of thought too often presumed to have rejected reason. In the process, he demonstrates that the virtues of Spinoza's rationalism have yet to be exhausted.

Betraying Spinoza

Betraying Spinoza
Author: Rebecca Goldstein
Publisher: Schocken
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2009-08-11
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0805242732

Part 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.

Spinoza

Spinoza
Author: Gilles Deleuze
Publisher: City Lights Books
Total Pages: 148
Release: 1988-04
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780872862180

Spinoza's theoretical philosophy is one of the most radical attempts to construct a pure ontology with a single infinite substance. This book, which presents Spinoza's main ideas in dictionary form, has as its subject the opposition between ethics and morality, and the link between ethical and ontological propositions. His ethics is an ethology, rather than a moral science. Attention has been drawn to Spinoza by deep ecologists such as Arne Naess, the Norwegian philosopher; and this reading of Spinoza by Deleuze lends itself to a radical ecological ethic. As Robert Hurley says in his introduction, "Deleuze opens us to the idea that the elements of the different individuals we compose may be nonhuman within us. One wonders, finally, whether Man might be defined as a territory, a set of boundaries, a limit on existence." Gilles Deleuze, known for his inquiries into desire, language, politics, and power, finds a kinship between Spinoza and Nietzsche. He writes, ""Spinoza did not believe in hope or even in courage; he believed only in joy and in vision . . . he more than any other gave me the feeling of a gust of air from behind each time I read him, of a witch's broom that he makes one mount. Gilles Deleuze was a professor of philosophy at the University of Paris at Vincennes. Robert Hurley is the translator of Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality.

The Spinoza Problem

The Spinoza Problem
Author: Irvin D. Yalom
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2012-03-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0465029655

A haunting portrait of Arthur Rosenberg, one of Nazism's chief architects, and his obsession with one of history's most influential Jewish thinkers In The Spinoza Problem, Irvin Yalom spins fact and fiction into an unforgettable psycho-philosophical drama. Yalom tells the story of the seventeenth-century thinker Baruch Spinoza, whose philosophy led to his own excommunication from the Jewish community, alongside that of the rise and fall of the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, who two hundred years later during World War II ordered his task force to plunder Spinoza's ancient library in an effort to deal with the Nazis' "Spinoza Problem." Seamlessly alternating between Golden Age Amsterdam and Nazi Germany, Yalom investigates the inner lives of these two enigmatic men in a tale of influence and anxiety, the origins of good and evil, and the philosophy of freedom and the tyranny of terror.

Hegel and Spinoza

Hegel and Spinoza
Author: Gregor Moder
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2017-07-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0810135434

Gregor Moder’s Hegel and Spinoza: Substance and Negativity is a lively entry into current debates concerning Hegel, Spinoza, and their relation. Hegel and Spinoza are two of the most influential philosophers of the modern era, and the traditions of thought they inaugurated have been in continuous dialogue and conflict ever since Hegel first criticized Spinoza. Notably, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German Idealists aimed to overcome the determinism of Spinoza’s system by securing a place for the freedom of the subject within it, and twentieth-century French materialists such as Althusser and Deleuze rallied behind Spinoza as the ultimate champion of anti-Hegelian materialism. This conflict, or mutual rejection, lives on today in recent discussions about materialism. Contemporary thinkers either make a Hegelian case for the productiveness of concepts of the negative, nothingness, and death, or in a way that is inspired by Spinoza they abolish the concepts of the subject and negation and argue for pure affirmation and the vitalistic production of differences. Hegel and Spinoza traces the historical roots of these alternatives and shows how contemporary discussions between Heideggerians and Althusserians, Lacanians and Deleuzians are a variation of the disagreement between Hegel and Spinoza. Throughout, Moder persuasively demonstrates that the best way to read Hegel and Spinoza is not in opposition or contrast but together: as Hegel and Spinoza.

Expressionism in Philosophy

Expressionism in Philosophy
Author: Gilles Deleuze
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2021-07-06
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1942130643

In this remarkable work, Gilles Deleuze, the renowned French philosopher, reflects on one of the thinkers of the past who most influenced his own sweeping reconfiguration of the tasks of philosophy. For Deleuze, Spinoza, along with Nietzsche and Lucretius, conceived of philosophy as an enterprise of liberation and radical demystification. He locates in Spinoza “a set of affects, a kinetic determination, an impulse” and makes Spinoza into “an encounter, a passion.” Expressionism in Philosophy was the culmination of a series of monographic studies by Deleuze (on Hume, Bergson, Nietzsche, Proust, Kant, and Sacher-Masoch) and prepared the transition from these abstract treatments of historical schemes of experience to the nomadology of Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, co-authored with Félix Guattari). Thus, Expressionism in Philosophy is both a pivotal reading of Spinoza’s work and a crucial text within the development of Deleuze’s thought.

The Ethics of Joy

The Ethics of Joy
Author: Andrew Youpa
Publisher:
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2020
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0190086025

Andrew Youpa offers an original reading of Spinoza's moral philosophy, arguing it is fundamentally an ethics of joy. Unlike approaches to moral philosophy that center on praiseworthiness or blameworthiness, Youpa maintains that Spinoza's moral philosophy is about how to live lovingly and joyously. His reading expands to examinations of the centrality of education and friendship to Spinoza's moral framework, his theory of emotions, and the metaphysical foundation of his moral philosophy.

Surplus

Surplus
Author: A. Kiarina Kordela
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2008-01-03
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9780791470206

Maintains that Lacanian psychoanalysis is the proper continuation of the line of thought from Spinoza to Marx.