Baruch Spinoza vs. George W. Bush

"Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand."

"While Schelling was wrestling with Plato, Spinoza, and Kant, his contemporary Hegel was struggling with Spinoza exclusively. In Hegel, Spinoza reached the he…"

"Hegel turned fully to Spinoza only in his early Jena years during his collaboration with Schelling, who had been especially inspired by Spinoza, and who, eve…"

"Monist is, in fact, every philosophy that is not an eclectic patchwork. Therefore, I gladly admit to you that I myself consider my positions even more monist…"

"It was not until the middle of the seventeenth century that pantheism was exhibited in its purest form by the great Baruch Spinoza; he gave for the totality …"

"In this Spartan room there was a man pacing little steps, his hands clasped behind his back, his big head thrust forward as though to butt. The man looked ex…"

"What Spinoza regards as ‘true religion’ and ‘true piety’ requires no belief in any historical events, supernatural incidents or metaphysical doctrines, and i…"

"It is also a very curious thing. Why should a 17th-century Portuguese-Jewish philosopher whose dense and opaque writings are notoriously difficult to underst…"

"Immortality in Spinoza"

"In the year 1888, before leaving the Normal School to face the experiences of actual life, he wrote Credo quia verum. This is a remarkable document, a spirit…"

"Today I have been reading Linné again and am quite unnerved by this extraordinary man. I have learned an infinite amount from him, not just in botany. Outsid…"

"The very starting-point of Spinoza, the search and discovery of the cause of causes, is hateful to Kant, who states that scientists err when they follow this…"

"...They have had the most painful history of all peoples, not without the fault of all of us, and when one owes to them the noblest man , the purest sage , t…"

"Good European" that he is, Spinoza takes from the Jewish tradition the common property of European ideas that it conveyed to him — and nothing else. Thus we …"

"...I had just finished my first semester and had brought along Spinoza's Ethics to read during that vacation. I was never found without the small book. If we…"

"The philosophy of a purely theoretical thinker, who contemplates all things from the point of view of things in themselves, belongs in the same class as the …"

"The encounter between the two greatest philosophers of the seventeenth century in fact extended over several days. From a letter Leibniz posted to the Duke o…"

"...We may deny his conclusions; we may consider his system of thought preposterous and even pernicious, but we cannot refuse him the respect which is the rig…"

"Pantheism is as old as philosophy. It was taught in the old Greek schools — by Plato, by St. Augustine, and by the Jews. Indeed, one may say that Pantheism, …"

"To us it seems that this difference, which Spinoza's thought constitutes in the history of Western metaphysics, represents an extremely high point of the the…"