The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World

Author: Matthew Stewart
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393071049
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 346

Book Description
"Exhilarating…Stewart has achieved a near impossibility, creating a page-turner about jousting metaphysical ideas, casting thinkers as warriors." —Liesl Schillinger, New York Times Book Review Once upon a time, philosophy was a dangerous business—and for no one more so than for Baruch Spinoza, the seventeenth-century philosopher vilified by theologians and political authorities everywhere as “the atheist Jew.” As his inflammatory manuscripts circulated underground, Spinoza lived a humble existence in The Hague, grinding optical lenses to make ends meet. Meanwhile, in the glittering salons of Paris, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was climbing the ladder of courtly success. In between trips to the opera and groundbreaking work in mathematics, philosophy, and jurisprudence, he took every opportunity to denounce Spinoza, relishing his self-appointed role as “God’s attorney.” In this exquisitely written philosophical romance of attraction and repulsion, greed and virtue, religion and heresy, Matthew Stewart gives narrative form to an epic contest of ideas that shook the seventeenth century—and continues today.

Courtier and the Heretic

Author: Matthew Stewart
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0393329178
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 0

The Book of the Courtier

Author: conte Baldassarre Castiglione
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Courtesy
Languages : en
Pages : 526

Book Description

Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic

Author: Matthew Stewart
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393244318
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 502

Book Description
Longlisted for the National Book Award. Where did the ideas come from that became the cornerstone of American democracy? America’s founders intended to liberate us not just from one king but from the ghostly tyranny of supernatural religion. Drawing deeply on the study of European philosophy, Matthew Stewart brilliantly tracks the ancient, pagan, and continental ideas from which America’s revolutionaries drew their inspiration. In the writings of Spinoza, Lucretius, and other great philosophers, Stewart recovers the true meanings of “Nature’s God,” “the pursuit of happiness,” and the radical political theory with which the American experiment in self-government began.

Betraying Spinoza

Author: Rebecca Goldstein
Publisher: Schocken
ISBN: 0805242732
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
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.

Galileo Courtier

Author: Mario Biagioli
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022621897X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 417

Book Description
Informed by currents in sociology, cultural anthropology, and literary theory, Galileo, Courtier is neither a biography nor a conventional history of science. In the court of the Medicis and the Vatican, Galileo fashioned both his career and his science to the demands of patronage and its complex systems of wealth, power, and prestige. Biagioli argues that Galileo's courtly role was integral to his science—the questions he chose to examine, his methods, even his conclusions. Galileo, Courtier is a fascinating cultural and social history of science highlighting the workings of power, patronage, and credibility in the development of science.

The Book of the Courtier

Author: Baldassarre Castiglione
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Book Description

The Courtier and the King

Author: James M. Boyden
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520086227
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Book Description
"This is a little jewel of a book. Beautifully and elegantly written, it examines the political career of an important figure at the court of Philip II of Spain. It is political biography in the best sense of the term."--Richard Kagan, author of Lucrecia's Dreams

Galileo Engineer

Author: Matteo Valleriani
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9048186455
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 333

Book Description
Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), his life and his work have been and continue to be the subject of an enormous number of scholarly works. One of the con- quences of this is the proliferation of identities bestowed on this gure of the Italian Renaissance: Galileo the great theoretician, Galileo the keen astronomer, Galileo the genius, Galileo the physicist, Galileo the mathematician, Galileo the solitary thinker, Galileo the founder of modern science, Galileo the heretic, Galileo the courtier, Galileo the early modern Archimedes, Galileo the Aristotelian, Galileo the founder of the Italian scienti c language, Galileo the cosmologist, Galileo the Platonist, Galileo the artist and Galileo the democratic scientist. These may be only a few of the identities that historians of science have associated with Galileo. And now: Galileo the engineer! That Galileo had so many faces, or even identities, seems hardly plausible. But by focusing on his activities as an engineer, historians are able to reassemble Galileo in a single persona, at least as far as his scienti c work is concerned. The impression that Galileo was an ingenious and isolated theoretician derives from his scienti c work being regarded outside the context in which it originated.

The Management Myth: Debunking Modern Business Philosophy

Author: Matthew Stewart
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393072746
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Book Description
"A devastating bombardment of managerial thinking and the profession of management consulting…A serious and valuable polemic." —Wall Street Journal Fresh from Oxford with a degree in philosophy and no particular interest in business, Matthew Stewart might not have seemed a likely candidate to become a consultant. But soon he was telling veteran managers how to run their companies. In narrating his own ill-fated (and often hilarious) odyssey at a top-tier firm, Stewart turns the consultant’s merciless, penetrating eye on the management industry itself. The Management Myth offers an insightful romp through the entire history of thinking about management, a withering critique of pseudoscience in management theory, and a clear explanation of why the MBA usually amounts to so much BS—leading us through the wilderness of American business thought.