A Book Forged in Hell

Author: Steven Nadler
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069113989X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 299

Book Description
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: Theological-Political Treatise

Author: Jonathan Israel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139463616
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 451

Book Description
Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise (1670) is one of the most important philosophical works of the early modern period. In it Spinoza discusses at length the historical circumstances of the composition and transmission of the Bible, demonstrating the fallibility of both its authors and its interpreters. He argues that free enquiry is not only consistent with the security and prosperity of a state but actually essential to them, and that such freedom flourishes best in a democratic and republican state in which individuals are left free while religious organizations are subordinated to the secular power. His Treatise has profoundly influenced the subsequent history of political thought, Enlightenment 'clandestine' or radical philosophy, Bible hermeneutics, and textual criticism more generally. It is presented here in a translation of great clarity and accuracy by Michael Silverthorne and Jonathan Israel, with a substantial historical and philosophical introduction by Jonathan Israel.

Spinoza

Author: Stuart Hampshire
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 24

Book Description

Born in Hell, Forged in the Fire, Prosper in the Warmth

Author: Larry E. Miller
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781646201556
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 70

Book Description
It's a book of connection, spoken through experience. This book is meant to reach people and help them through whatever demons they may be fighting. We all go through something whether it's losing a loved one or growing up in the not so nice part of town. This book isn't meant to solve your problems it's meant to show you there is always a way to express how you are feeling the way you do and how to turn those emotions into something amazing not because others like it but because it's your words, your feelings.

Spinoza

Author: Steven M. Nadler
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521002936
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 442

Book Description
Complete biography of Spinoza based on detailed archival research.

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.

Spinoza

Author: Steven M. Nadler
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108425542
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 459

Book Description
A fully updated new edition of the prize-winning and now standard biography of the great seventeenth-century philosopher Spinoza.

Think Least of Death

Author: Steven Nadler
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691233950
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Book Description
"The seventeenth-century Dutch-Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza has long been known - and vilified - for his heretical view of God and for the radical determinism he sees governing the cosmos and human freedom. Only recently, however, has he begun to be considered seriously as a moral philosopher. In his philosophical masterpiece, the Ethics, after establishing some metaphysical and epistemological foundations, he turns to the "big questions" that so often move one to reflect on, and even change, the values that inform their life: What is truly good? What is happiness? What is the relationship between being a good or virtuous person and enjoying happiness and human flourishing? The guiding thread of the book, and the source of its title, is a claim that comes late in the Ethics: "The free person thinks least of all of death, and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life." The life of the free person, according to Spinoza, is one of joy, not sadness. He does what is "most important" in life and is not troubled by such harmful passions as hate, greed and envy. He treats others with benevolence, justice and charity. And, with his attention focused on the rewards of goodness, he enjoys the pleasures of this world, but in moderation. Nadler makes clear that these ethical precepts are not unrelated to Spinoza's metaphysical views. Rather, as Nadler shows, Spinoza's views on how to live are intimately connected to and require an understanding of his conception of human nature and its place in the cosmos, his account of values, and his conception of human happiness and flourishing. Written in an engaging style this book makes Spinoza's often forbiddingly technical philosophy accessible to contemporary readers interested in knowing more about Spinoza's views on morality, and who may even be looking to this famous "atheist", who so scandalized his early modern contemporaries, as a guide to the right way of living today"--

Rembrandt's Jews

Author: Steven M. Nadler
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226567372
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Book Description
There is a popular and romantic myth about Rembrandt and the Jewish people. One of history's greatest artists, we are often told, had a special affinity for Judaism. With so many of Rembrandt's works devoted to stories of the Hebrew Bible, and with his apparent penchant for Jewish themes and the sympathetic portrayal of Jewish faces, it is no wonder that the myth has endured for centuries. Rembrandt's Jews puts this myth to the test as it examines both the legend and the reality of Rembrandt's relationship to Jews and Judaism. In his elegantly written and engrossing tour of Jewish Amsterdam—which begins in 1653 as workers are repairing Rembrandt's Portuguese-Jewish neighbor's house and completely disrupting the artist's life and livelihood—Steven Nadler tells us the stories of the artist's portraits of Jewish sitters, of his mundane and often contentious dealings with his neighbors in the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam, and of the tolerant setting that city provided for Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews fleeing persecution in other parts of Europe. As Nadler shows, Rembrandt was only one of a number of prominent seventeenth-century Dutch painters and draftsmen who found inspiration in Jewish subjects. Looking at other artists, such as the landscape painter Jacob van Ruisdael and Emmanuel de Witte, a celebrated painter of architectural interiors, Nadler is able to build a deep and complex account of the remarkable relationship between Dutch and Jewish cultures in the period, evidenced in the dispassionate, even ordinary ways in which Jews and their religion are represented—far from the demonization and grotesque caricatures, the iconography of the outsider, so often found in depictions of Jews during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Through his close look at paintings, etchings, and drawings; in his discussion of intellectual and social life during the Dutch Golden Age; and even through his own travels in pursuit of his subject, Nadler takes the reader through Jewish Amsterdam then and now—a trip that, under ever-threatening Dutch skies, is full of colorful and eccentric personalities, fiery debates, and magnificent art.

Spinoza's Religion

Author: Clare Carlisle
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069122420X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
A bold reevaluation of Spinoza that reveals his powerful, inclusive vision of religion for the modern age Spinoza is widely regarded as either a God-forsaking atheist or a God-intoxicated pantheist, but Clare Carlisle says that he was neither. In Spinoza’s Religion, she sets out a bold interpretation of Spinoza through a lucid new reading of his masterpiece, the Ethics. Putting the question of religion centre-stage but refusing to convert Spinozism to Christianity, Carlisle reveals that “being in God” unites Spinoza’s metaphysics and ethics. Spinoza’s Religion unfolds a powerful, inclusive philosophical vision for the modern age—one that is grounded in a profound questioning of how to live a joyful, fully human life. Like Spinoza himself, the Ethics doesn’t fit into any ready-made religious category. But Carlisle shows how it wrestles with the question of religion in strikingly original ways, responding both critically and constructively to the diverse, broadly Christian context in which Spinoza lived and worked. Philosophy itself, as Spinoza practiced it, became a spiritual endeavor that expressed his devotion to a truthful, virtuous way of life. Offering startling new insights into Spinoza’s famously enigmatic ideas about eternal life and the intellectual love of God, Carlisle uncovers a Spinozist religion that integrates self-knowledge, desire, practice, and embodied ethical life to reach toward our “highest happiness”—to rest in God. Seen through Carlisle’s eyes, the Ethics prompts us to rethink not only Spinoza but also religion itself.