[...] How is he a Jew of the seventeenth century have written this? These are the words of a German of the twentieth century! The following pages about how "the ceremonial and the pump in religion obstruct the judgment to the point that they leave more space in mind for the right reason, even to emit a doubt." Amazing!
[...] Write these words in 1670 requires courage: 1670, this is barely two generations after Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for heresy, and only after the trial of Galileo by the Vatican.
To dissect the minds of Baruch Spinoza and Alfred Rosenberg, writer and psychotherapist Irvin Yalom staged fictional interlocutors sufficiently intimate of our two thinkers for dialogues make sense. There is little doubt that the angle through which the author addresses both these thinkers is narrow and biased but it is frankly delighted to have been invited to this philosophy class who will not hesitate to take a ride on the side eudaemonism of Plato or Epicurus ataraxia.
Irvin Yalom guides us step by step into the mysteries of philosophy, and he explains patiently explained again, sometimes it shows almost too didactic.
Two courses and two thoughts (well mostly a) that a priori have so little in common, two eras priori total opposites, and an exciting book that almost reads like a thriller.
At a time when fundamentalism of all stripes are exacerbated on all sides, until Israel from Iran, where the fatwa and herem invite themselves up at home, where obscurantism and fanaticism regain lost ground, this ode to free thought is a reading more than beneficial, mandatory.
Note that in the 1950s, Ben-Gurion tried to lift the curse that always herem Baruch Spinoza for three centuries without success, the rabbis of Jerusalem today are still as uncompromising as those of Amsterdam once.
[...] I do not believe that questioning is a disease. Lobéissance blind without question is the disease.
[...] The idea that I defend: the religious authorities, be they what, want to prevent that sexerce our reasoning.
[...] I believe that the more we know, the less there will be things known only to God. In other words, the greater ignorance, and lon attributes things to God.
How dare you
With Galileo, Copernicus, Giordano and others, Spinoza was one of the small lights that lit up in the darkness of that time. One of the brightest without a doubt.
At a time when one is suddenly more if some keep the electricity still on, we need to keep an eye on the glow of these lights.
The pen Irvin Yalom is fierce and uncompromising: the rabbis of the seventeenth and the Nazis in the twentieth take for their respective grades. No one can cultivate and maintain ignorance without running afoul of Professor Yalom.
There there's biography, partial certainly, but still a dual biography.
There there Extension of Spinoza's thought.
There where the historical novel, even a double history.
Between the frightening power of Spinoza's thought (in the seventeenth!) And below the first Nazi theories, we take a very brilliant book.
If the summer of 2013 with Montaigne did you like, the next holiday will perhaps with Spinoza.
PS: for once, you can start at the end with an epilogue entitled 'Genesis of the problem Spinoza' that illuminates the path of docteurYalom and therefore the frame of this curious book for the curious.
