Spinoza: A Life - Hardcover

Nadler, Steven

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521552109 ISBN 13: 9780521552103

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1999

Synopsis

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) was one of the most important philosophers of all time; he was also arguably the most radical and controversial. This was the first complete biography of Spinoza in any language and is based on detailed archival research. More than simply recounting the story of Spinoza's life, the book takes the reader right into the heart of Jewish Amsterdam in the seventeenth century and, with Spinoza's exile from Judaism, right into the midst of the tumultuous political, social, intellectual and religious world of the young Dutch Republic. Though the book will be an invaluable resource for philosophers, historians, and scholars of Jewish thought, it has been written for any member of the general reading public with a serious interest in philosophy, Jewish history, seventeenth-century European history, and the culture of the Dutch Golden Age. Spinoza: A Life has recently been awarded the Koret Jewish Book Award.

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Reviews

With eloquent sobriety and restraint, this biography of the Dutch-Jewish thinker whom Bertrand Russell called ``the most lovable of the philosophers'' communicates much of its subject's rarefied spirit. Though many tomes have been written on Spinoza's thought, little has been published on his life, because, as Nadler (Philosophy/Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison) observes, most of his revealing personal letters were destroyed after his death. Accordingly, apart from sections on the long-known facts of Spinoza's existence, especially the Amsterdam Jewish community's infamous excommunication of him in1656, much of this biography's mood is appropriately subjunctive: Spinoza may have known his contemporary Rembrandt; must have been amused by the Jewish fervor over the messianic pretender of his day, Shabbetai Zvi; and probably did not represent the Dutch government to the French, as has sometimes been claimed, during the Franco-Dutch war of the 1670s. Two facts convincingly deduced by Nadler about Spinoza are that he never studied for the rabbinate and that some of Amsterdam's Jews continued to associate with him even after his excommunication. But, like 17th-century Netherlandish paintings, the strength of this study is its contextual details, as in the several pages devoted to discussing the Dutch craze for speculative investment in tulip bulbs imported from Turkey (the famously Dutch flower was not native to Holland) and its likely impact on the Spinoza family's fortunes. The faint outlines of Spinoza's life take on a brighter color against the backdrop of Nadler's rich evocations of the tensions between Amsterdam's Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews, Calvinist and Remonstrant Christians, and Orangist and De Wittian statesmen. The stories of Spinoza's friendships with other intellectual luminaries of the day, such as Leibniz, Christiaan Huygens, and Robert Boyle, are retold in the context of this lively social and political history. Spinoza, so often sainted or demonized, at last receives a fine, measured biography. (11 photos, unseen) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Nadler (philosophy, Univ. of Wisconsin at Madison) is active in the Center for Jewish Studies there, which is reflected in one of the major questions he attempts to answer in this biography: "What did it mean to be a philosopher and a Jew in the Dutch Golden Age?" He answers it convincingly in this thoroughly researched study. Scholars will find this work rigorous enough for them, but it was also written with the general reader in mind. Spinoza (1632-77) is a notoriously difficult thinker, yet Nadler has given us not only as detailed a picture of Spinoza's life as we are likely to see, based on the best recent scholarship, but also an analysis of Spinoza's ideas that the nonspecialist will find understandable and provocative. For academic and public collections in philosophy, Jewish studies, and 17th-century European history.?Leon H. Brody, U.S. Office of Personnel Mgt. Lib., Washington, DC
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0521552109
• ISBN 13: 9780521552103
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 422