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The courtier and the heretic : Leibniz, Spinoza, and the fate of God in the modern world by Stewart, Matthew, 1963- is a philosophy book available to read on EtoBox.

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From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. According to Nietzsche, "Every great philosophy is... a personal confession of its creator and a kind of involuntary and unperceived memoir.". Stewart affirms this maxim in his colorful reinterpretation of the lives and works of 17th-century philosophers Spinoza and Leibniz. In November 1676, the foppish courtier Leibniz, "the ultimate insider... an orthodox Lutheran from conservative Germany," journeyed to The Hague to visit the self-sufficient, freethinking Spinoza, "a double exile... an apostate Jew from licentious Holland." A prodigious polymath, Leibniz understood Spinoza’s insight that "science was in the process of rendering the God of revelation obsolete; that it had already undermined the special place of the human individual in nature." Spinoza embraced this new world. Seeing the orthodox God as a "prop for theocratic tyranny," he articulated the basic theory for the modern secular state. Leibniz, on the other hand, spent the rest of his life championing God and theocracy like a defense lawyer defending a client he knows is guilty. He elaborated a metaphysics that was, at bottom, a reaction to Spinoza and collapses into Spinozism,

Who reads The courtier and the heretic : Leibniz, Spinoza, and the fate of God in the modern world?

Author

Stewart, Matthew, 1963-

Publisher

W. W. Norton & Company, Incorporated

Published

2007

Language

EN

ISBN

9780393058987

Category

philosophy

Subjects

Memoir, Fiction, Religion

Rating

3.95 / 5 (578 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14