Spinoza's True Ideas: Suggestive Convergences

Knox Peden

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapterpeer-review

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 languageEnglish
Title of host publicationSpinoza in Twenty-First-Century American and French Philosophy
Subtitle of host publicationMetaphysics, Philosophy of Mind, Moral and Political Philosophy
EditorsJack Stetter, Charles Ramond
Place of PublicationLondon
PublisherBloomsbury Academic
Chapter7
Pages207-222
Number of pages15
ISBN (Electronic)9781350067325, 9781350067318
ISBN (Print)9781350067301
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2019
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Spinoza
  • Metaphysics
  • History of Western Philosophy
  • Philosophy
  • Modern Philosophy (Sixteenth-Century to Eighteenth-Century)
  • Convergence

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