Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

Spinoza and Dutch Cartesianism
ISBN: 9780198732501
Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / Oxford University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Philosophy History of Philosophy;

Alexander X. Douglas offers a new understanding of Spinoza's philosophy by situating it in its immediate historical context. He defends a thesis about Spinoza's philosophical motivations and then bases an interpretation of his major works upon it. The thesis is that much of Spinoza's philosophy was conceived with the express purpose of rebutting the claim made by some of his contemporaries that philosophy is intrinsically incapable of revealing anything of anyrelevance to theology. In contrast, Spinoza believed that philosophy reveals the true nature of God, and that God is nothing like what the majority of theologians, or indeed of religious believers ingeneral, think he is. The practical implications of this change in the concept of God were profound and radical. As Douglas shows, many of Spinoza's theories were directed towards showing how the separation his opponents endeavoured to maintain between philosophical and non-philosophical (particularly theological) thought was logically untenable.