RUTH AYLETT admires the blunt honesty with which a woman’s experience is recorded, but detects the unexamined privilege that underlies it
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‘Peace is not the absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition of benevolence, confidence, justice’ - Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise, 1670
GORDON PARSONS recommends a fine introduction to a philosopher who, like Marx, worked to help society to reject illusion and understand the realities of the human condition
spinoza
IAN SINCLAIR draws attention to the powerful role that literature plays in foreseeing the way humanity will deal with climate crisis
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The Chinese language only introduced a feminine pronoun in the 1920s. Now, it might adopt a gender-inclusive one, suggests JANET DAVEY
Spinoza: Freedom’s Messiah
Ian Buruma, Yale University Press, £16.99
IT has been observed that Baruch Spinoza does not rate very highly in the popular pantheon of world philosophers and yet, as much as many of his better-known analytical sages, along with Descartes his contemporary, he can be seen to fulfil Marx’s necessary demand that more than interpreting the world, philosophers should strive to change it.
Both were born in the 17th century “Dutch Golden Age,” when Amsterdam became the city at the centre of world trade, science and culture, unlike the rest of Europe where the straightjacket of religious control was imposed by Catholic and various Protestant sects. Indeed, this “city of refuge for Jews, Huguenots, Quakers and other victims of persecution was known as Vrijstad, meaning Freetown.”
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