Betraying Spinoza : The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity

English

ISBN: 0805211594

EAN: 9780805211597

Category: Biography & Autobiography / General/Philosophy / History & Surveys / Modern/Biography & Autobiography / Philosophers/

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Release Date: 08/11/2009

Synopsis: Part of the Jewish Encounter series In 1656, Amsterdams Jewish community excommunicated Baruch Spinoza, and, at the age of twentythree, 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 Spinozas 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 Spinozas 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. From the Hardcover edition.

Betraying Spinoza : The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity

Illustrated: Yes

Format: Paperback

Height: 0.79 inches

Width: 5.16 inches

Length: 7.95 inches

Weight: 11.22 oz

Pages: 304