The Courtier and the Heretic - Softcover

Matthew Stewart

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0300125070 ISBN 13: 9780300125078

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2007

Synopsis

Both Baruch de Spinoza and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz were at the centre of an intense religious, political and personal battle that gave birth to the modern age. Their characters and ways of life defined their philosophies, but Leibniz became obsessed with Spinoza's writings, leading to a titanic clash of beliefs.

About this title

About the Author:

Matthew Stewart received his doctorate in philosophy from Oxford University.

From Publishers Weekly:

Starred Review. According to Nietzsche, "Every great philosophy is... a personal confession of its creator and a kind of involuntary and unperceived memoir.". Stewart affirms this maxim in his colorful reinterpretation of the lives and works of 17th-century philosophers Spinoza and Leibniz. In November 1676, the foppish courtier Leibniz, "the ultimate insider... an orthodox Lutheran from conservative Germany," journeyed to The Hague to visit the self-sufficient, freethinking Spinoza, "a double exile... an apostate Jew from licentious Holland." A prodigious polymath, Leibniz understood Spinoza's insight that "science was in the process of rendering the God of revelation obsolete; that it had already undermined the special place of the human individual in nature." Spinoza embraced this new world. Seeing the orthodox God as a "prop for theocratic tyranny," he articulated the basic theory for the modern secular state. Leibniz, on the other hand, spent the rest of his life championing God and theocracy like a defense lawyer defending a client he knows is guilty. He elaborated a metaphysics that was, at bottom, a reaction to Spinoza and collapses into Spinozism, as Stewart deftly shows. For Stewart, Leibniz's reaction to Spinoza and modernity set the tone for "the dominant form of modern philosophy"—a category that includes Kant, Hegel, Bergson, Heidegger and "the whole 'postmodern' project of deconstructing the phallogocentric tradition of western thought." Readers of philosophy may find much to disagree with in these arguments, but Stewart's wit and profluent prose make this book a fascinating read. (Jan. 2006)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0300125070
• ISBN 13: 9780300125078
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320