Think Least of Death

Think Least of Death PDF Author: Steven Nadler
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691233950
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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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"--

Think Least of Death

Think Least of Death PDF Author: Steven Nadler
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691233950
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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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"--

Spinoza's Religion

Spinoza's Religion PDF Author: Clare Carlisle
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069122420X
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.

Civilizing Money

Civilizing Money PDF Author: Constantine George Caffentzis
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781786806802
Category : Capitalism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
An engaging and unique study of Enlightenment philosopher David Hume's understanding of money and his role in the rise of capitalism.

Spinoza on Learning to Live Together

Spinoza on Learning to Live Together PDF Author: Susan James
Publisher:
ISBN: 019871307X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Philosophising, as Spinoza conceives it, is the project of learning to live joyfully. This in turn is a matter of learning to live together, and the most obvious test of philosophical insight is our capacity to sustain a harmonious way of life. Susan James defends this interpretation and explores Spinoza's influence on contemporary debates.

Hegel Or Spinoza

Hegel Or Spinoza PDF Author: Pierre Macherey
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452933103
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
The first English-language translation of a classic work of French philosophy

Spinoza

Spinoza PDF Author: Gilles Deleuze
Publisher: City Lights Books
ISBN: 9780872862180
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
Spinoza's theoretical philosophy is one of the most radical attempts to construct a pure ontology with a single infinite substance. This book, which presents Spinoza's main ideas in dictionary form, has as its subject the opposition between ethics and morality, and the link between ethical and ontological propositions. His ethics is an ethology, rather than a moral science. Attention has been drawn to Spinoza by deep ecologists such as Arne Naess, the Norwegian philosopher; and this reading of Spinoza by Deleuze lends itself to a radical ecological ethic. As Robert Hurley says in his introduction, "Deleuze opens us to the idea that the elements of the different individuals we compose may be nonhuman within us. One wonders, finally, whether Man might be defined as a territory, a set of boundaries, a limit on existence." Gilles Deleuze, known for his inquiries into desire, language, politics, and power, finds a kinship between Spinoza and Nietzsche. He writes, ""Spinoza did not believe in hope or even in courage; he believed only in joy and in vision . . . he more than any other gave me the feeling of a gust of air from behind each time I read him, of a witch's broom that he makes one mount. Gilles Deleuze was a professor of philosophy at the University of Paris at Vincennes. Robert Hurley is the translator of Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality.

Hegel and Spinoza

Hegel and Spinoza PDF Author: Gregor Moder
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810135434
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Gregor Moder’s Hegel and Spinoza: Substance and Negativity is a lively entry into current debates concerning Hegel, Spinoza, and their relation. Hegel and Spinoza are two of the most influential philosophers of the modern era, and the traditions of thought they inaugurated have been in continuous dialogue and conflict ever since Hegel first criticized Spinoza. Notably, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German Idealists aimed to overcome the determinism of Spinoza’s system by securing a place for the freedom of the subject within it, and twentieth-century French materialists such as Althusser and Deleuze rallied behind Spinoza as the ultimate champion of anti-Hegelian materialism. This conflict, or mutual rejection, lives on today in recent discussions about materialism. Contemporary thinkers either make a Hegelian case for the productiveness of concepts of the negative, nothingness, and death, or in a way that is inspired by Spinoza they abolish the concepts of the subject and negation and argue for pure affirmation and the vitalistic production of differences. Hegel and Spinoza traces the historical roots of these alternatives and shows how contemporary discussions between Heideggerians and Althusserians, Lacanians and Deleuzians are a variation of the disagreement between Hegel and Spinoza. Throughout, Moder persuasively demonstrates that the best way to read Hegel and Spinoza is not in opposition or contrast but together: as Hegel and Spinoza.

Revolutionary Jews from Spinoza to Marx

Revolutionary Jews from Spinoza to Marx PDF Author: Professor Emeritus Jonathan I Israel
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780295748665
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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Book Description
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a small but conspicuous fringe of the Jewish population became the world's most resolute, intellectually driven, and philosophical revolutionaries, among them the pre-Marxist Karl Marx. Yet the roots of their alienation from existing society and determination to change it extend back to the very heart of the Enlightenment, when Spinoza and other philosophers living in a rigid, hierarchical society colored by a deeply hostile theology first developed a modern revolutionary consciousness. Leading intellectual historian Jonathan Israel shows how the radical ideas in the early Marx's writings were influenced by this legacy, which, he argues, must be understood as part of the Radical Enlightenment. He traces the rise of a Jewish revolutionary tendency demanding social equality and universal human rights throughout the Western world. Israel considers how these writers understood Jewish marginalization and ghettoization and the edifice of superstition, prejudice, and ignorance that sustained them. He investigates how the quest for Jewish emancipation led these thinkers to formulate sweeping theories of social and legal reform that paved the way for revolutionary actions that helped change the world from 1789 onward--but hardly as they intended.

Spinoza on Ethics and Understanding

Spinoza on Ethics and Understanding PDF Author: Peter Winch
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1785275445
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
This volume unites Peter Winch’s previously unpublished work on Baruch de Spinoza. The primary source for the text is a series of seminars on Spinoza that Winch gave, first at the University of Swansea in 1982 and then at King’s College London in 1989. What emerges is an original interpretation of Spinoza’s work that demonstrates his continued relevance to contemporary issues in metaphysics, epistemology and ethics, and establishes connections to other philosophers - not only Spinoza’s predecessors such as René Descartes, but also important 20th Century philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Simone Weil. Alongside Winch's lectures, the volume contains an interpretive essay by David Cockburn, and an introduction by the editors.

Hegel on the Proofs and Personhood of God

Hegel on the Proofs and Personhood of God PDF Author: Robert R. Williams
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019879522X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
Hegel's analysis of his culture identifies nihilistic tendencies in modernity i.e., the death of God and end of philosophy. Philosophy and religion have both become hollowed out to such an extent that traditional disputes between faith and reason become impossible because neither any longer possesses any content about which there could be any dispute; this is nihilism. Hegel responds to this situation with a renewal of the ontological argument (Logic) and ontotheology, which takes the form of philosophical trinitarianism. Hegel on the Proofs and Personhood of God examines Hegel's recasting of the theological proofs as the elevation of spirit to God and defense of their content against the criticisms of Kant and Jacobi. It also considers the issue of divine personhood in the Logic and Philosophy of Religion. This issue reflects Hegel's antiformalism that seeks to win back determinate content for truth (Logic) and the concept of God. While the personhood of God was the issue that divided the Hegelian school into left-wing and right-wing factions, both sides fail as interpretations. The center Hegelian view is both virtually unknown, and the most faithful to Hegel's project. What ties the two parts of the book together--Hegel's philosophical trinitarianism or identity as unity in and through difference (Logic) and his theological trinitarianism, or incarnation, trinity, reconciliation, and community (Philosophy of Religion)--is Hegel's Logic of the Concept. Hegel's metaphysical view of personhood is identified with the singularity (Einzelheit) of the concept. This includes as its speculative nucleus the concept of the true infinite: the unity in difference of infinite/finite, thought and being, divine-human unity (incarnation and trinity), God as spirit in his community.