Within Reason
A Life of Spinoza
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- £7.99
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
The seventeenth-century philosopher Spinoza was expelled from the Jewish community of Amsterdam the age of twenty-four for 'horrendous heresies', and was eventually reviled by all religious authorities for claiming that human beings are parts of a single, unified nature, that God is identical with nature, and that reason, not revelation, supplies the truth of any aspect of God. Undeterred, he made this thesis the basis for a rational crusade against superstition and prejudice. Dr Gullan-Whur's biography, the first for twenty-eight years, shows how Spinoza's central philosophical beliefs developed within the context of his own life. Drawing on very recent scholary research and making detailed reference to primary sources, some not previously explored, the author focuses on the philosopher's attempt to act solely through reason in the face of turbulent personal and national circumstances. This new approach demolishes the myth that Spinoza was a lofty ascetic. It exposes his emotional and sexual vulnerabilit arrogance and misogyny, yet shows his living philosophical experiment to be shrply relevant today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In defiance of Spinoza's 17th-century rationalism, which taught that all knowledge follows with mathematical precision from universal ideas of reason, Gullan-Whur attempts to locate the origins of Spinoza's thought in his largely undocumented personal and psychological life. Her chief sources are the philosopher's writings, mainly the Theologico-Political Treatise and Ethics, and his extant correspondence. Out of this biographically unpromising fare, she constructs a portrait of a man divided between need for love and solitude, sexual feeling and self-discipline, reasoned and mystical approaches to God. Her method is to judiciously juxtapose quotations from Spinoza's works with descriptions of his social setting, his friends and the historic events of his time, to suggest the impact of these on his thought. Unlike Steven Nadler, whose recent biography (Spinoza, 1999) is more accessibly written, Gullan-Whur devotes special attention to Spinoza's disparaging remarks about women, locating them in the unequal sex roles prescribed by 17th-century Dutch Jewish society. Embedded within her dense arguments about Spinoza's personality (which was, she says, mainly arrogant and ascetic), are helpful insights into his thought, such as his unusual view of self-propelled motion. Though, at their best, these extrapolations of personality, feeling and mood resemble a Henry James novel, they also convincingly reveal Gullan-Whur's impressive gifts as an interpreter of texts. It's less clear, however, that they reveal truths about Spinoza's character. Photos not seen by PW.
