“And therefore we can see just how constructive this Spinozian difference is, just how constructive this negativity really is! The organic interweaving of these two motifs is fundamental in the history of European philosophy. Spinoza is the first to mold this logical mechanism that bourgeois philosophy would constantly and continually try to abrogate during its subsequent development. In Kantianism, as in classical idealism, Spinoza continually remains the object of opposition and polemic: What is destroyed is precisely the intersection between the negation of the ideology and the construction of the world, the inherence of the limit, of the materiality, to the infinite.”

— Baruch Spinoza

Selected works, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza's Metaphysics and Politics (1991)

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Dutch philosopher 1632–1677

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“Spinoza is the clear and luminous side of Modern philosophy. He is the negation of bourgeois mediation and of all the logical, metaphysical, and juridical fictions that organize its expansion. He is the attempt to determine the continuity of the revolutionary project of humanism. With Spinoza, philosophy succeeds for the first time in negating itself as a science of mediation. In Spinoza there is the sense of a great anticipation of the future centuries; there is the intuition of such a radical truth of future philosophy that it not only keeps him from being flattened onto seventeenth-century thought but also, it often seems, denies any confrontation, any comparison. Really, none of his contemporaries understands him or refutes him.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza's Metaphysics and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). Translated from the Italian by Michael Hardt. Originally published as L'anomalia selvaggia. Saggio su potere e potenza in Baruch Spinoza (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1981)
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“In Spinoza, at the origin of the Modern world, metaphysical theory and the theory of science are given in complete agreement for the first time. They represent the alternative to the entire subsequent path of metaphysics and of the bourgeois theory of science. Spinoza lives as an alternative: Today this alternative is real. The Spinozian analytic of full space and open time are becoming an ethics of liberation in all the dimensions that this discourse constructs and makes available.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Selected works, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza's Metaphysics and Politics (1991)

“Is Spinoza baroque? No, but if we find, through this line of thinking, a spurious and worn-out figure that rejects the crisis, that repeats the utopia in its ingenuous Renaissance form, what we have found is merely Spinozism. When classical idealism takes up Spinoza, in effect it only takes up (or invents?) Spinozism, a Renaissance philosophy of the bourgeois revolution of the capitalist market!”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Selected works, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza's Metaphysics and Politics (1991)

“Spinoza accomplishes the synthesis of traditional philosophical components by means of breaking and shattering. It is useless to pursue the presuppositions of Spinozian philosophy if we do not look for them in the qualitative leap determined by his philosophy. The continuity of Spinozian thought with respect to the preceding course of the history of metaphysics consists of a radical discontinuity, one that exalts the utopia of consciousness and freedom (a patrimony of Western thought) in a project of liberation. The perspective of the world is not a utopia, the immanentism is not aesthetic, and the liberation is no longer artisanal, but all of this is presupposed, it is taken as a basis.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Selected works, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza's Metaphysics and Politics (1991)

“Just as Hegel later developed the metaphysical and rationalistic bases of the Spinoza philosophy giving the only possible refutation to Spinozism, that is, by converting the substance of Spinoza into an absolute idea, into the absolute spirit, and in this way, presented an antithesis to Spinozist teaching, so in his time, Spinoza presented an antithesis with respect to Descartes, but a materialistic antithesis.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Lev Vygotsky, in his collected notebooks [original in Russian]
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“For Spinoza, philosophy originates in the very personal… feeling of emptiness”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Context: For Spinoza, philosophy originates in the very personal... feeling of emptiness that in the philosophical tradition has earned the distinguished name of contemptu mundi, the contempt for worldly things, or, better, vanitas.... Spinoza says that... success in life is just a postponement of failure;... pleasure is just a fleeting respite from pain; and... the objects of our striving are vain illusions....
The feeling of vanitas Spinoza describes is... a dire encounter with the prospect of descent into absolute nothingness, a life without significance coming to a meaningless end.... The experience Spinoza records... establishes... the moment of extreme doubt, fear, and uncertainty that precedes the dawn of revelation.... the journey... is one trodden by poets, philosophers, and theologians too numerous to mention, who for millennia have recorded this feeling that life is a useless passion, a wheel of ceaseless striving, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, and so on.<!--pp. 55-56

Matthew Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic (2006)

“Neophil: …Leibniz, Wolff, and their various successors, to what a level of perfection and completeness they have brought philosophy! How proud Germany can be of them! Yet what does it help to claim more for oneself than is right? Let us always acknowledge that someone other than a German, I add further, someone other than a Christian, namely, Spinoza, has participated immensely in the work of bettering philosophy. Before the transition from the Cartesian to the Leibnizian philosophy could occur, it was necessary for someone to take the plunge into the monstrous abyss lying between them. This unhappy lot fell to Spinoza. How his fate is to be pitied! He was a sacrifice for the human intellect, but one that deserves to be decorated with flowers. Without him, philosophy would never have been able to extend its borders so far.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Moses Mendelssohn, in his Philosophical Writings (1755–77) [original in German]
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“My philosophy is normal human orthodox philosophy, such as has come down from the Indians through the Greeks, to Spinoza. It is simply not Protestant philosophy. The problems of Protestant philosophy do not exist for me: I regard them as products of a confusion of thought, of a heresy. Catholic philosophy differs from the normal only in that it accepts sacred history as well as natural history as the true account of the facts: but when the facts are agreed upon, one way or another, philosophy has no real difficulty in discovering what to say. It has said everything essential already. To invent a philosophy would be not to have understood.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

George Santayana, in his letter to John Boynton Priestley, 15 September 1924
S - Z, George Santayana

“As is known, scientific physics dates its existence from the discovery of the differential calculus. Only when it was learned how to follow continuously the course of natural events, attempts, to construct by means of abstract conceptions the connection between phenomena, met with success. To do this two things are necessary: First, simple fundamental concepts with which to construct; second, some method by which to deduce, from the simple fundamental laws of the construction which relate to instants of time and points in space, laws for finite intervals and distances, which alone are accessible to observation”

Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) German mathematician

can be compared with experience
Die partiellen Differentialgleichungen der mathematischen Physik (1882) as quoted by Robert Édouard Moritz, Memorabilia Mathematica; Or, The Philomath's Quotation-book https://books.google.com/books?id=G0wtAAAAYAAJ (1914) p. 239

“It can be argued that in trying to see behind the formal predictions of quantum theory we are just making trouble for ourselves. Was not precisely this the lesson that had to be learned before quantum mechanics could be constructed, that it is futile to try to see behind the observed phenomena?”

John S. Bell (1928–1990) Northern Irish physicist

"Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Experiments", included in Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics (1987), p. 82 https://books.google.com/books?id=FGnnHxh2YtQC&pg=PA82

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