Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

Being and Reason
ISBN: 9780198834151
Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / Oxford University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Philosophy History of Philosophy;

Spinoza is one of the central figures in what has been called the "Radical Enlightenment". He subjects tradition and hierarchy to rational scrutiny, replacing magic with science and inherited privilege with equality and democracy. Spinoza grounds such ideas in his metaphysics, according to which there is only one substance, God or nature, and all else is only a mode of this substance. Some have interpreted this metaphysics as a kind of idealism in which only theOne is truly real and all seeming metaphysical diversity is an illusion or is otherwise reducible to something mental. This book argues against such interpretations, and for a realist interpretation inwhich finite natural creatures stand to God or nature as waves stand to an ocean.