Selected works, Spinoza and Buddha: Visions of a Dead God (1933)
“The (respective) position of Judaism toward Spinoza coincides with the (respective) position of Europe toward him. However, it does not completely coincide with it. Spinoza played a special role in the Judaism of the past century. When what mattered was the justification of the breakup of the Jewish tradition and the entry of the Jews into modern Europe, perhaps no better, but certainly no more convenient, reference offered itself than the appeal to Spinoza. Who was more suitable for undertaking the justification of modern Judaism before the tribunal of the Jewish tradition, on the one hand, and before the tribunal of modern Europe, on the other, than Spinoza, who, as was almost universally recognized, was a classical exponent of this Europe and who, as one did not grow weary of at least asserting, had thought his thoughts in the spirit of Judaism and by means of Judaism? It is clear that, at a time when modern Europe has been shaken to its foundations, one can no longer justify oneself before this Europe for the sake of Judaism, nor before Judaism for the sake of this Europe, supposing one still wants to do so.”
Leo Strauss, Das Testament Spinozas (1932) [original in German]
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Baruch Spinoza 210
Dutch philosopher 1632–1677Related quotes
Thomas Henry Huxley, in his letter, 3 November 1892. Originally published in Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley (London: Macmillan & Co., 1913)
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Selected works, Spinoza and Buddha: Visions of a Dead God (1933)
Steven Nadler, in article Baruch Spinoza, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (First published Jun 29, 2001; substantive revision Jul 4, 2016)
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Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)
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Martin Buber, in his Heruth: On Youth and Religion (1919)
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Selected works, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza's Metaphysics and Politics (1991)
http://richardlangworth.com/enemies-of-civilization-misquoting-churchill
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Early career years (1898–1929)
This proposition is infinitely important; only, negation as such is formless abstraction. However, speculative philosophy must not be charged with making negation or nothing an ultimate: negation is as little an ultimate for philosophy as reality is for it truth. Of this proposition that determinateness is negation, the unity of Spinoza's substance — or that there is only one substance — is the necessary consequence. Thought and being or extension, the two attributes, namely, which Spinoza had before him, he had of necessity to posit as one in this unity; for as determinate realities they are negations whose infinity is their unity. According to Spinoza's definition, of which more subsequently, the infinity of anything is its affirmation. He grasped them therefore as attributes, that is, as not having a separate existence, a self-subsistent being of their own, but only as sublated, as moments; or rather, since substance in its own self lacks any determination whatever, they are for him not even moments, and the attributes like the modes are distinctions made by an external intellect.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic, 1812
G - L, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Lev Vygotsky, in his collected notebooks [original in Russian]
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