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Journal

2014 | 40 | 22-44

Article title

Spinoza, Enlightenment, and Classical German Philosophy

Selected contents from this journal

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EN

Abstracts

EN
This paper offers a critical discussion of Jonathan Israel’s thesis that the political and moral ideas and values which define liberal democratic modernity should be regarded as the legacy of the Radical Enlightenment and thus as deriving from Spinoza. What I take issue with is not Israel’s map of the actual historical lines of intellectual descent of ideas and account of their social and political impact, but the accompanying conceptual claim, that Spinozism as filtrated by the naturalistic wing of eighteenth-century French thought, is conceptually sufficient for the ideology of modernity. The post-Kantian idealist development, I argue, qualifies as radical, and hinges on Spinoza, but its construal of Spinoza does not fit Israel’s thesis, and reflects an appreciation of the limitations, for the purpose of creating a rational modernity, of the naturalistic standpoint represented by thinkers such as d’Holbach.

Journal

Year

Issue

40

Pages

22-44

Physical description

Contributors

References

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Document Type

Publication order reference

Identifiers

YADDA identifier

bwmeta1.element.desklight-62f95ced-7bcc-4fbe-adc6-6d35d0248b44
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