Steven Nadler Livres

Complete biography of Spinoza based on detailed archival research. schovat popis

From Pulitzer Prize-finalist Steven Nadler comes an engaging exploration of what Spinoza can teach us about life's profound questions. In 1656, Baruch Spinoza was excommunicated from Amsterdam's Portuguese-Jewish community for his controversial beliefs, leading him to abandon his family's business to pursue philosophy. His radical views on God, the Bible, and free thought made him notorious across Europe. However, Spinoza's primary motivation was to address a pressing human concern: how to lead a good life and find happiness in a world without a providential God. Nadler connects Spinoza's ideas with his life and historical context, illustrating how the philosopher serves as a guide to living well. In his work, Spinoza describes the "free person," who, driven by reason, leads a joyful life focused on self-improvement and the well-being of others. Free individuals rise above negative passions like hate and envy, treating others with kindness and justice. They appreciate the pleasures of life, practicing moderation. As Spinoza notes, "The free person thinks least of all of death," emphasizing that true wisdom lies in a focus on life itself. This introduction to Spinoza's moral philosophy reveals how his insights remain relevant for living today.

"In this book the philosophers Steve Nadler and Lawrence Shapiro will explain why bad thinking happens to good people. Why is it, they ask, that so large a segment of public can go so wrong in both how they come to form the opinions they do and how they fail to appreciate the moral consequences of acting on them."--Publisher's description.

Three general accounts of causation stand out in early modern Cartesian interactionism, occasionalism, and Leibniz's preestablished harmony. The contributors to this volume examine these theories in their philosophical and historical context. They address them both as a means for answering specific questions regarding causal relations and in their relation to one another, in particular, comparing occasionalism and the preestablished harmony as responses to Descartes's metaphysics and physics and the Cartesian account of causation. Philosophers discussed include Descartes, Gassendi, Malebranche, Arnauld, Leibniz, Bayle, La Forge, and other, less well-known figures.