Spinoza in 90 Minutes (Philosophers in 90 Minutes Series)
Longtime readers of Paul Strathern's 90 Minutes books--pamphlets, really--know the drill: Strathern provides a minibiography of one of the world's great philosophers and an overview of his intellectual contributions, interspersed with Strathern's sometimes witty, sometimes merely sarcastic, comments about his subject's life and surroundings. His book on Spinoza, whose philosophy he considers "one of the finest ever produced," is no exception. Spinoza was an outcast in 17th-century Holland; as a Jew, he faced opposition from the Christians, and as a radical thinker who attacked not only the scientific but theological authority of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament), he was shunned--excommunicated, even--by the Jewish community. Left to his own devices, he crafted a pantheistic philosophy based on the premise that God and the universe are one and the same, so that to harm others is ultimately to harm oneself. As Strathern writes, it has "a compelling beauty unequaled in the history of philosophy." (Although, in order to get to that level of brilliance, Spinoza had to write his share of clunkers, including one book that Strathern describes as "reducing Descartes' delightful and lucid style to a rubble of almost impenetrable mathematics.")