Mateo's review
Courtier And The Heretic
by Matthew Stewart
Mateo's review
Courtier And The Heretic by Matthew Stewart
Mateo's review
rating:
At last, a book for all of us who have been long awaiting a work about the fateful 1676 meeting between Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz.
I enjoyed this book. I know nothing about philosophy, unless by "philosophy" you mean the Packer's West Coast short passing game, but I enjoyed this book nonetheless. I fall short in sharing the author's almost carnal reverence for Spinoza, whose philosophy strikes me as remarkably turgid and who, I can't help think, really should have just been an atheist and have done with it--although I appreciate Spinoza's devotion to reason and materialism over received theology and its bracing effect on Western thought. And I rather think that Stewart has it in for poor Leibniz, who, while admittedly a prevaricating, egotistical flatterer whose notion of monads strikes me as something that you'd come up with if you were in a Loony Tunes cartoon and had just been struck with a mallet, DID invent the calculus, after all.
Despite a tende...more
I enjoyed this book. I know nothing about philosophy, unless by "philosophy" you mean the Packer's West Coast short passing game, but I enjoyed this book nonetheless. I fall short in sharing the author's almost carnal reverence for Spinoza, whose philosophy strikes me as remarkably turgid and who, I can't help think, really should have just been an atheist and have done with it--although I appreciate Spinoza's devotion to reason and materialism over received theology and its bracing effect on Western thought. And I rather think that Stewart has it in for poor Leibniz, who, while admittedly a prevaricating, egotistical flatterer whose notion of monads strikes me as something that you'd come up with if you were in a Loony Tunes cartoon and had just been struck with a mallet, DID invent the calculus, after all.
Despite a tende...more
