Author: Graeme Hunter
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351906917
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 179
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Book Description
Spinoza is praised as a father of atheism, a precursor of the Enlightenment, an 'anti-theologian' and a father of political liberalism. When the religious dimension of Spinoza's thought cannot be ignored, it is usually dismissed as some form of mysticism or pantheism. This book explores the positive references to Christianity presented throughout Spinoza's works, focusing particularly on the Tractatus Theologico-politicus. Arguing that advocates of the anti-Christian or un-Christian Spinoza fail to look beyond Spinoza's ethics, which has the least to say about Christianity, Graeme Hunter offers a fresh interpretation of Spinoza's most important works and his philosophical and religious thought. While there is no evidence that Spinoza became a Christian in any formal sense, Hunter argues that his aim was neither to be heretical nor atheistic, but rather to effect a radical reform of Christianity and a return to simple Biblical practices. This book presents a unique contribution to current debate for students and specialist scholars in philosophy of religion, the history of philosophy and early modern history.
Author: Tammy Nyden-Bullock
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1441106596
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 177
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Book Description
Seventeenth-century Holland was a culture divided. Orthodox Calvinists, loyal to both scholastic philosophy and the quasi-monarchical House of Orange, saw their world turned upside down with the sudden death of Prince William II and no heir to take his place. The Republicans seized this opportunity to create a decentralized government favourable to Holland's trading interests and committed to religious and philosophical tolerance. The now ruling regent class, freshly trained in the new philosophy of Descartes, used it as a weapon to fight against monarchical tendencies and theological orthodoxy. And so began a great pamphlet debate about Cartesianism and its political and religious consequences. This important new book begins by examining key Radical Cartesian pamphlets and Spinoza's role in a Radical Cartesian circle in Amsterdam, two topics rarely discussed in the English literature. Next, Nyden-Bullock examines Spinoza's political writings and argues that they should not be seen as political innovations so much as systemizations of the Radical Cartesian ideas already circulating in his time. The author goes on to reconstruct the development of Spinoza's thinking about the human mind, truth, error, and falsity and to explain how this development, particularly the innovation of parallelism - the lynchpin of his system - allowed Spinoza to provide philosophical foundations for Radical Cartesian political theory. She concludes that, contrary to general opinion, Spinoza's rejection of Cartesian epistemology involves much more than the metaphysical problems of dualism - it involves, ironically, Spinoza's attempt to make coherent a political theory bearing Descartes's name.
Author: Anna Tomaszewska
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350195855
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
Kant's defence of religion and attempts to reconcile faith with reason position him as a moderate Enlightenment thinker in existing scholarship. Challenging this view and reconceptualising Kant's religion along rationalist lines, Anna Tomaszewska sheds light on its affinities with the ideas of the radical Enlightenment, originating in the work of Baruch Spinoza and understood as a critique of divine revelation. Distinguishing the epistemological, ethical and political aspects of such a critique, Tomaszewska shows how Kant's defence of religion consists of rationalizing its core tenets and establishing morality as the essence of religious faith. She aligns him with other early modern rationalists and German Spinozists and reveals the significance for contemporary political philosophy. Providing reasons for prioritizing freedom of thought, and hence religious criticism, over an unqualified freedom of belief, Kant's theology approximates the secularising tendency of the radical Enlightenment. Here is an understanding of how the shift towards a secular outlook in Western culture was shaped by attempts to rationalize rather than uproot Christianity.
Author: Aldo Di Giovanni
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781541042711
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 60
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Book Description
Spinoza's close and intimate Christian friends thought that under Spinoza's guidance, they could fend off the superstitions of the established churches. ..".we may, under your guidance, uphold truth against those who are religious and Christian in a superstitious way, and may stand firm against the onslaught of the whole world. (EP8)" Not only does Spinoza's work belong to the 17th century radical protestant movement in Holland, as Graeme Hunter suggests in his book, Radical Protestantism in Spinoza's Thought, Spinoza is the most spiritually insightful and is at the extremes of that radicalism. A profound and singular voice, Spinoza accepts only the Truth and nothing less than the Truth. Spinoza's contributions to our enlightenment reveal and will yet reveal the 'ways of God' to people. Between the lines of Spinoza's Ethic lies a critical contribution to Christology, leading to a viable 21st century Christology. This booklet brings Spinoza's contribution forward in a suitably radical presentation.
Author: VolkswagenStiftung,
Publisher: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht
ISBN: 3647552585
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 277
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Book Description
This volume of essays explores the themes of radicalism and dissent within Protestantism. The comparisons highlight the contingent nature of particular settlements and narratives, and reveal the extent to which the definition of religious radicalism was dependent upon immediate context and show that radicalism and dissent were truly transnational phenomena. The historiography of the so-called radical reformation has been unduly shaped by the hostile categories imposed by mainstream or magisterial reformers during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This volume argues that scholars should adopt an open-ended understanding of evangelical reform, and recognize that the boundaries between radicalism and its opposite were not always firmly drawn. The distinction between the two is an inheritance of the Lutheran Reformation of the 1520s, which shaped not only the later course of the Reformation in the Holy Roman Empire but also attitudes towards and writings on religious dissent in the Netherlands and England. Radical critique is immanent within mainstream Protestantism, in a faith that emphasizes the power of the gospel with its unrelenting demands.
Author: Paul Avis
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0567705668
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 417
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Book Description
Challenging the common assumption that the Enlightenment of the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries was an essentially secular, irreligious and atheistic movement, this book critiques this standard interpretation as based on a narrow view of Enlightenment sources. Building on the work of revisionist historians, this volume takes the argument squarely into the theological domain, whether Anglican, Dissenting, Lutheran or deistic, whilst also noting that the Enlightenment deeply affected Roman Catholic and Jewish theologies. It challenges the stereotype of 'Enlightenment rationalism', and the penultimate chapter brings out the biblical and ecclesial roots of the image of enlightenment and reclaims it for Christian faith.
Author: Clare Carlisle
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691224196
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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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.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004362215
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 430
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Book Description
This volume investigates the impact of Radical Enlightenment thought on German culture during the eighteenth century. It takes recent work by Jonathan Israel as its point of departure and debates the precise nature of Enlightenment.
Author: Mogens Lærke
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0192895419
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 401
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Book Description
This study considers freedom of speech and the rules of engagement in the public sphere; good government, civic responsibility, and public education; and the foundations of religion and society, as seen through the eyes of seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher, Spinoza.
Author: Travis L. Frampton
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 9780567025937
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 278
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Book Description
Frampton reassesses Spinoza's relationship to higher criticism by drawing attention to the emergence of historical-critical investigations of the Bible from among heterodox Protestants during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
