Volume 54, Number 6 · April 12, 2007
The Lessons of Spinoza
By Avishai Margalit
The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World
by Matthew Stewart
Norton, 351 pp., $25.95
Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity
by Rebecca Goldstein
Nextbook/Schocken, 287 pp., $19.95
In his beautifully written book The Courtier and the Heretic, Matthew Stewart examines the lives of two great philosophers: Spinoza and Leibniz. As the title of the book indicates, he stresses the contrast between Leibniz's career as a courtier and adviser to German princes and Spinoza's meager existence as a heretic Jew in Holland, rather than on the similarities between the two. The lives of Benedictus (Baruch) de Spinoza (1632–1677) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646– 1716) intersected once. They met in November 1676, when Leibniz, then thirty years old, made what Stewart describes as a dramatic visit to The Hague, with the sole purpose of talking to the forty-three-year-old Spinoza. 'In large part as a direct result of his meeting with Spinoza,' Stewart writes, Leibniz formulated 'his own original and antithetical response to the challenges of the modern era.' Spinoza died three months later.
Review, 5035 words
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