![]() ![]() ![]() He takes the five so-called books of Moses and shows why they probably aren’t by a single person, and certainly not by Moses. ![]() “The first task Spinoza set himself in the Tractatus is to undermine the traditional notion of the Bible as the inerrant word of God.” (In fact, the Tractatus is arguably the first serious work of biblical criticism.) ![]() But the first task Spinoza set himself in the Tractatus is to undermine the traditional notion of the Bible as the inerrant word of God. God is certainly not like us: he doesn’t have emotions and wishes in the normal sense. I suppose the most famous ideas expounded in the Ethics is that God is equivalent to nature, in some sense, and so should not be thought of as a personal being. It doesn’t require any philosophical background, and gives you many of the main themes of Spinoza’s thought. His Tractatus, by contrast, is intelligible to everybody. The Ethics is the work of Spinoza’s that people try to read, but most of them get very little out of it. Another reason, which has nothing particularly to do with religion, is that it’s intelligible, unlike Spinoza’s Ethics, which you really need to have studied quite a lot of philosophy to understand. One is that it is way ahead of its time in its understanding of the human nature of traditional religion, and on the place of religion in society. Foreign Policy & International Relationsīy Baruch Spinoza & Samuel Shirley (translator) Read. ![]()
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