27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Decent, usable translation, May 14, 2001
This review is from: A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works (Paperback)
Curley does a decent job of translating Spinoza, although his penchant for identifying the Latin vocabulary with English cognates, almost without exception, sometimes lacks sensitivity to the content at hand. Both his introductory essay and selection of texts illustrate his peculiar, if not intriguing, analytical interpretation of Spinoza. For beginning readers of Spinoza, these issues will certainly not obstruct the view of Spinoza's extraordinary system. Advanced students who have not mastered their Latin, should consult Shirley or, dare I say, Elwes, for additional perspective on Spinoza's ideas.
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26 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent selections, lucidly translated, June 8, 1999
This review is from: A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works (Paperback)
This volume of excerpts from Spinoza's writings, selected and translated by Edwin Curley, provides a surprisingly accessible overview of the life and thought of rationalism's greatest "saint." Curley's translations are crisp, clear and accurate, and his selections well-chosen. The reader unfamiliar with Spinoza and with no background in philosophy is advised to begin with Roger Scruton's _Spinoza_ volume in the Past Masters series, also available from Amazon, and then move on to this extremely helpful volume.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The man who made Einstein's God, August 26, 2009
This review is from: A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works (Paperback)
Albert Einstein was asked in a telegram by Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein whether he believed in God. Einstein responded by telegram: "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings." This famous quote is what lead me to seek out and read 'A Spinoza Reader.'
The book was one of the most challenging that I have ever read.
First, for those who are wondering what is in it and what might be left out, 'A Spinoza Reader' contains the entirety of 'The Ethics', which constitutes most of this book, and so it has only a limited number of Spinoza's other writings. Those few are carefully selected from his primary published work known as the Theological-Political Treatise ('The Ethics' was unpublished in Spinoza's lifetime), along with some unpublished fragments that preceded and foreshadowed `The Ethics', and several letters to his friends which discuss his ideas a little less formally. These letters are helpful in spelling out both what Spinoza means by many of his more abstract fundamental concepts, and how clearly he (I dare say wrongly) supposed his logic and meaning were explicitly self-evident.
`The Spinoza Reader' also contains a very helpful 25 page introduction by the translator ('The Ethics' was originally written in Latin with some Dutch), which covers key biographical facts and other background material, so that one need not know much at all about Spinoza to get a good cursory appreciation for his ideas just from the book alone.
Written in some secrecy in the 17th Century, and not only unpublished in Spinoza's lifetime but also banned by Orthodox Jews and Catholics for many years after, 'The Ethics' (along with the writings of Descartes, Pascal, John Lock, and a few others) is part of the landmark in human thought with respect to questioning of traditional intellectual authority (particularly religious authority in this case) by the application of logic and reason, which is now known now as modernism; as opposed not only to traditional authoritarianism in the distant past, but also to postmodernism, which seems to question everything, including logic, reason, and even reality itself.
The writing in this 300-page book is very tedious (It took me as long to read as it did to read 'War and Peace', which is more than four times longer and not exactly light reading either), primarily because 'The Ethics' is stylistically modeled on Euclid's writings on the logical foundations of Geometry -- but still, for those few folks who have taken classes in the foundations of logic or have studied and enjoyed pure math or college level philosophy and thus who will not be put to sleep by such a brutally non-intuitive approach to knowledge-building -- for those few of us, reading 'The Ethics' is a great way to contemplate the meaning of life and the idea of God as conceived by an original, highly influencial, and intellectually courageous iconoclast from the dawn of the so-called Age of Reason. And for me, knowing that this book was banned for so long (and that Spinoza was excommunicated by the Holland Jewish community for similar ideas) pushed me to keep reading so that I could get to the core of his thesis.
Put very simply, this thesis seems to be: God is hypothetically knowable to all of us, but is not accurately represented in any biblical anthropomorphisms. Instead this God *is* the universe itself, and at the same time *is* all ideas in the universe, along with any other unknown infinite substances.
And more practically: our purpose is to know this God, and in order to get closer to Him (one might even say `closer to It', since to Spinoza, God is not a person in any way), we must (for reasons which he deduces literally with mathematical logic and precision from his definition of God) strive not to sink to negative relations with our fellow man or succumb to passions (lust, anger, envy, etc.) formed in ignorance of the infinite chain of cause-and-effect which leads to any given passion; and above all, we must accept that absolutely everything in nature is a manifestation of this God. Einstein's God.
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