Showing results for "Baruch Spinoza" in World Literature

Internationally best-selling novelist Irvin D. Yalom explores the mindsets of two men separated by 300 years. Using his skills as a psychiatrist, he explores the inner lives of Baruch Spinoza, the Jewish 17th-century secular philosopher, and of Alfred Rosenberg, outspoken Nazi ideologue, faithful servant of Hitler, the main author of racial policy for the Third Reich, and a godless mass murderer....

Baruch Spinoza has been called the Prince of Philosophers; Hegel said of him that the alternative was: either Spinoza, or no philosophy at all. By laying the groundwork for the 18th-century Enlightenment and modern biblical criticism, including modern conceptions of the self and the universe, he came to be considered one of the great rationalists of 17th-century philosophy: he had the courage to criticize the traditionalism of religion, to offer a conception of God that would be logic instead of rigidly defined by a shallow dogma.