Popkin' Spinoza

Abstract

Among philosophers, Spinoza has the unusual fortune that his philosophical pre-eminence is more than matched by a strong non-philosophical following. Notwithstanding the austere, not to say forbidding, analytic rigor of his deductive arguments in his Ethics, he is in danger of becoming everybody's favorite philosopher: recognised internationally as a member of the canon of great philosophers; claimed by the Dutch as the foremost Dutch philosopher; seized on by feminists for disposing of the mind-body dichotomy, and as a philosopher of the emotions; lauded by liberal historians as the origin of modern democratic values and the true father of secular enlightenment; accommodated to Judaism, even if still branded a heretic; imagined, historically, as a kind of Socrates redivi-vus, who set himself above the bigotry and back-biting of his age, to lead a life of isolated tranquillity, live his philosophy — the list is as variegated as it extensive.