Within Reason: Life of Spinoza Book

Baruch Spinoza (1632-77) remains one of the most important but also, paradoxically, neglected of all the great Enlightenment philosophers. Margaret Gullan-Whur's biography Within Reason: A Life of Spinoza testifies to the difficulty of producing a biography of this paradigmatically "difficult" man. Not only were Spinoza's philosophical writings notoriously complex and subject to wild distortion but details of his work and life remain scattered across archives in Hebrew, Latin, Dutch, German, French and English. As Gullan-Whur also complains, her subject was a difficult, lonely figure, "an intellectually supercilious man, whose arrogance seldom tallied with his criterion for rational self-esteem, and whose testiness was ingrained". Nevertheless, in Within Reason Gullan-Whur manages to squeeze out an interesting portrait of this patrician, misogynistic philosopher and is particularly effective in situating him in relation to the intellectually and politically volatile world of 17th-century Amsterdam. Stressing his Jewish-Portuguese background, Gullan-Whur explores his mysterious expulsion from the Jewish community in 1656, apparently on the grounds of religious heresy and analyses the ways in which this moment influenced his subsequent philosophical studies, A Theologico-Political Treatise(1670), Ethics (c.1661) and his critique of Descartes, The Principles of Descartes' Philosophy (1663). Gullan-Whur then follows Spinoza's fraught intellectual relations with figures such as Oldenburg, Boyle and Huygens, his fascination with natural philosophy and his growing political involvement in the conflict between Holland and France towards the end of his life. However, what runs throughout this biography are the guiding principles that shaped Spinoza's austere life and for which he was vilified: the belief that "human beings were parts or aspects of a single, unified nature; that God was identical with nature and that reason, not revelation or unanalysed experience, supplied the truth of any aspect of God or Nature. Unpacking these ideas admittedly makes heavy reading andWithin Reason is probably more for those with an interest in the history of science and philosophy than the casual biography reader. --Jerry BrottonRead More