Abstract
It’s a recurrence bordering on cliché to begin accounts of the history of Spinozism with a remark on the plurality of philosophical roles that Spinoza has taken on, from the godless heretic who scandalized seventeenth-century Dutch Jewry to the Gottbetrunkener Mensch who inspired nineteenth-century German Romanticism. Politically, things aren’t much clearer when one notes that the same thinker beloved of Marxists is also dear to a tradition that runs from Bismarck to Kissinger. A lot of this disparity has to do with the different intellectual, cultural, and political contexts that Spinoza has occupied. If your concern is liberalism, you think of him alongside Hobbes; if it’s religion, he’s placed somewhere between Maimonides and radical Protestantism; the metaphysicians regard him as either post-Cartesian or pre-Kantian, or both. The point is that Spinoza serves a variety of theoretical purposes. This is a historical fact. But there’s another historical fact that...
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Spinoza in Twenty-First-Century American and French Philosophy |
Subtitle of host publication | Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind, Moral and Political Philosophy |
Editors | Jack Stetter, Charles Ramond |
Place of Publication | London |
Publisher | Bloomsbury Academic |
Chapter | 7 |
Pages | 207-222 |
Number of pages | 15 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781350067325, 9781350067318 |
ISBN (Print) | 9781350067301 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2019 |
Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- Spinoza
- Metaphysics
- History of Western Philosophy
- Philosophy
- Modern Philosophy (Sixteenth-Century to Eighteenth-Century)
- Convergence