Baruch Spinoza vs. Stephen Jay Gould
Read 20 entries attributed to Baruch Spinoza alongside 20 attributed to Stephen Jay Gould. Compare the wording and topic labels.
This page places 20 entries attributed to Baruch Spinoza alongside 20 attributed to Stephen Jay Gould. Each selection is ordered by stored importance score. These are selections from QuoteLineage, not complete accounts of either author's work.
Topic labels present in both displayed selections: knowledge, philosophy, truth, life, death, justice. Shared labels do not by themselves demonstrate agreement, disagreement, or influence between the authors.
Attributed to Baruch Spinoza, entry #323: "Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand."
Attributed to Stephen Jay Gould, entry #222466: "Results rarely specify their causes unambiguously. If we have no direct evidence of fossils or human chronicles, if we are forced to infer a process only from its modern results, …"
Side-by-Side Comparison
Baruch Spinoza
1632 – 1677
Baruch (de) Spinoza, also known under his Latinized pen name Benedictus de Spinoza, was a philosopher of Portuguese-Jewish origin, who was born and lived in the Dutch Republic. A forerunner of the Age of Enlightenment, Spinoza significantly influenced modern biblical criticism, 17th-century rationalism, and Dutch intellectual culture, establishing himself as one of the most important and radical philosophers of the early modern period. Influenced by Stoicism, Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, Ibn Tufayl, and heterodox Christians, Spinoza was a leading philosopher of the Dutch Golden Age.
"Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand."
#Human Nature"While Schelling was wrestling with Plato, Spinoza, and Kant, his contemporary Hegel was struggling with Spinoza exclusively. In Hegel, Spinoza reached the he…"
#time"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…"
#knowledge"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…"
#philosophy"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…"
#religion"...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…"
#mind"Spinoza is the anomaly. The fact that Spinoza, atheist and damned, does not end up behind bars or burned at the stake, like other revolutionary innovators of…"
#philosophy"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…"
#truth"Spinoza, as George Kline tells us, was a favorite with Russian Marxists: "Spinoza has received more attention from Soviet writers than any other pre-Marxian …"
#philosophy"Nature as conceived by many ecologists, and expressed philosophically by James Lovelock and others, is not the passive, dead, value-neutral nature of mechani…"
#life"Immortality in Spinoza"
#death"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…"
#religion"...But I was indeed on Spinoza's "line" by insisting with Marx and Hegel on the distinction between the "real concrete," therefore, the universal singular , …"
#knowledge"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…"
#knowledge"In defining thought as an attribute Spinoza towered above any representative of mechanistic materialism and was at least two centuries in advance of his time…"
#mind"...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…"
#power"Hegel is an admirable 'theoretician' of ideology insofar as he is a 'theoretician' of Universal Recognition who unfortunately ends up in the ideology of Abso…"
#knowledge"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 …"
#justice"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 …"
#time"The philosophy of Descartes underwent a great variety of unspeculative developments, but in Benedict Spinoza a direct successor to this philosopher may be fo…"
#philosophyStephen Jay Gould
1941 – 2002
Stephen Jay Gould was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, historian of science, and one of the most influential and widely read authors of popular science of his generation. Gould spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In 1996, Gould was hired as the Vincent Astor Visiting Research Professor of Biology at New York University, after which he divided his time teaching between there and Harvard.
"Results rarely specify their causes unambiguously. If we have no direct evidence of fossils or human chronicles, if we are forced to infer a process only fro…"
#leadership"All interesting issues in natural history are questions of relative frequency, not single examples. Everything happens once amidst the richness of nature. Bu…"
#nature"Few intellectual tyrannies can be more recalcitrant than the truths that everybody knows and nearly no one can defend with any decent data . And few intellec…"
#knowledge"If the resident zoologist of Galaxy X had visited the earth 5 million years ago while making his inventory of inhabited planets in the universe, he would sur…"
#creativity"The vigorous branching of life's tree, and not the accumulating valor of mythical marches to progress, lies behind the persistence and expansion of organic d…"
#life"He confronts a basic tool of the measurers—the statistical technique called factor analysis, developed by the influential English psychologist Charles Spearm…"
#philosophy"Giraffes do use their long necks to browse leaves, at the tops of acacia trees - but such current function, no matter how vital, does not prove that the neck…"
#philosophy"In his anti-Darwinian book... , Francis Hitching tells the story... "The need to survive by reaching ever higher for food is, like so many Darwinian explanat…"
#justice"I first met Stephen Jay Gould in the sixth grade in Queens, New York, when we were the only two geeks in the school interested in natural history and particu…"
#writing"Bowing to the reality of harried lives, Rudwick recognizes that not everyone will read every word of the meaty second section; he even explicitly gives us pe…"
#books"f texts are unified by a central logic of argument, then their pictorial illustrations are integral to the ensemble, not pretty little trifles included only …"
#philosophy"The problem may be briefly stated: What does "median mortality of eight months" signify in our vernacular? I suspect that most people, without training in st…"
#death"The solution, as all thoughtful people recognize, must lie in properly melding the themes of inborn predisposition and shaping through life's experiences. Th…"
#life"Later evolutionary theorists of linear progress had to advance the overtly physical and historical claim that an ancestral lineage of arthropods actually tur…"
#art"I respect Kirkpatrick both for his sponges and for his numinous nummulosphere. It is easy to dismiss a crazy theory with laughter that debars any attempt to …"
#knowledge"The Unofficial Stephen Jay Gould Archive"
#history"In this crucial sense, the theory of punctuated equilibrium adopts a very conservative position. The theory asserts no novel claim about modes or mechanisms …"
#philosophy"Yet I also appreciate that we cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well—…"
#love"Now it is not very hard to find out, if you spend a little while reading in evolution, that Gould is the John Kenneth Galbraith of his subject. That is, he i…"
#love"But all evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence. Variation is the hard reality, not a set of imperfect measur…"
#truth