Posted by Dr. Anthony ADRIAN
August 11, 2009 -
1,301 views
Here is one of the Western Philosophers I believed had alot to add in our world.
Baruch Spinoza – 17th century philosophy
School/tradition: Rationalism, founder of Spinozism
Influenced: Hegel, Marx, Davidson, Schopenhauer, Deleuze, Einstein, Fichte, Novalis,Leibniz, Goethe, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Althusser, Hardt, Negri, Fromm, Santayana, Schelling, Bookchin, Kant, Butler,Kook, Kaplan, Ben-Gurion, Levinas,Coleridge, and ME! :)
Here is a little-bit on some of his controversial ideas he set forth:
Spinoza became known in the Jewish community for positions contrary to
normative Jewish belief, with critical positions towards the
Talmud and other religious texts. In the summer of 1656, the Jewish community issued to him the writ of
cherem (Hebrew: חרם, a kind of
excommunication), perhaps for the
apostasy of how he conceived
God. Righteous indignation on the part of the synagogue elders at Spinoza's
heresies was probably not the sole cause for the excommunication; there was also the practical concern that his ideas, which disagree equally well with the orthodoxies of other religions as with Judaism, would not sit well with the Christian leaders of
Amsterdam and would reflect badly on the whole Jewish community, endangering the limited freedoms that the Jews had achieved in that city. The terms of his
cherem were severe.
[5] He was, in
Bertrand Russell's words, "cursed with all the curses in
Deuteronomy and with the curse that
Elisha pronounced on the children who, in consequence, were torn to pieces by the she-bears."
[6] The
cherem was, atypically, never revoked. Following his excommunication, he adopted the first name Benedictus, the
Latin equivalent of his given name, Baruch; they both mean "blessed". In his native Amsterdam he was also known as Bento (Portuguese for Benedict or blessed) de Spinoza, which was the informal form of his name.
After his
cherem, it is reported that Spinoza lived and worked in the school of
Franciscus van den Enden, who taught him Latin in his youth and may have introduced him to modern philosophy, although Spinoza never mentions Van den Enden anywhere in his books or letters. Van den Enden was a
Cartesian and
atheist who was forbidden by the city government to propagate his doctrines publicly.
During this period Spinoza also became acquainted with several
Collegiants, members of an eclectic
sect with tendencies towards
rationalism. Spinoza also corresponded with
Peter Serrarius, a radical
Protestant and
millennarian merchant. Serrarius is believed to have been a patron of Spinoza at some point.
[citation needed] By the beginning of the 1660s, Spinoza's name became more widely known, and eventually
Gottfried Leibniz[7] and
Henry Oldenburg paid him visits, as stated in Matthew Stewart's
The Courtier and the Heretic.
[7] Spinoza corresponded with Oldenburg for the rest of his short life. Spinoza's first publication was his geometric
[clarification needed] exposition of Descartes,
Parts I and II of Descartes' Principles of Philosophy (1663). From December 1664 to June 1665, Spinoza engaged in correspondence with
Blyenbergh, an amateur
Calvinist theologian, who questioned Spinoza on the definition of
evil. Later in 1665, Spinoza notified Oldenburg that he had started to work on a new book, the
Theologico-Political Treatise, published in 1670. Leibniz disagreed harshly with Spinoza in Leibniz's own published
Refutation of Spinoza, but he is also known to have met with Spinoza on at least one occasion
[7] (as mentioned above), and his own work bears certain striking resemblances to certain key parts of Spinoza's philosophy (see:
Monadology).
When the public reactions to the anonymously published
Theologico-Political Treatise were extremely unfavourable to his brand of Cartesianism, Spinoza was compelled to abstain from publishing more of his works. Wary and independent, he wore a
signet ring engraved with his initials, a rose
[citation needed], and the word "caute" (Latin for "cautiously"). The
Ethics and all other works, apart from the
Descartes' Principles of Philosophy and the
Theologico-Political Treatise, were published after his death, in the
Opera Posthuma edited by his friends in secrecy to avoid confiscation and destruction of manuscripts
