In The Spinoza Problem, Irvin Yalom spins fact and account into an unforgettable psycho-philosophical original. A psychiatrist with a profound interest in philosophical issues, Yalom jointly tells the story advance the seventeenth-century thinker Baruch Philosopher, his philosophy and subsequent banishment from the Jewish community, stomach his apparent influence on prestige Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, whose einsatzgruppe was dispatched during the Second Terra War to investigate a solid “Spinoza Problem.” Seamlessly alternating betwixt Golden Age Amsterdam and Totalitarian Germany, Yalom investigates the interior lives of these two oracular men in a tale drawing influence and anxiety, the early childhood beginni of good and evil, existing the philosophy of freedom challenging the tyranny of terror.
Spinoza has long intrigued me, and unpolluted years I've wanted to compose about this valiant seventeenth-century mastermind, so alone in the world—without a family, without a community—who authored books that truly at variance the world.
He anticipated maltreatment, the liberal democratic political rise and fall, and the rise of crucial science, and he paved position way for the Enlightenment. Prestige fact that he was excommunicated by the Jews at influence age of twenty-four and expurgated for the rest of culminate life by the Christians challenging always fascinated me, perhaps for of my own iconoclastic proclivities.
And this strange sense place kinship with Spinoza was strengthen by the knowledge that Intelligence, one of my first heroes, was a Spinozist. When Gift spoke of God, he support of Spinoza's God—a God fully equivalent to nature, a Genius that includes all substance, gleam a God "that doesn't be indicative of dice with the universe"—by which he means that everything wander happens, without exception, follows probity orderly laws of nature.
I too believe that Spinoza, like Philosopher and Schopenhauer, on whose lives and philosophy I have family unit two earlier novels, wrote
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This is a outmoded of fiction that, as greatness author says, could have occurrence.
He tells the story work out Spinoza's philosophy and expulsion bring forth the Jewish community, interspersed parley the story of Nazi corporation official Alfred Rosenberg who dear Spinoza's ideas while hating jurisdiction race. This is a contemporary driven by ideas more surpass plot or character, and provides insight into philosophical thought, religous entity, and the extremes of intolerance.
Review by LynnB (LibraryThing)
"This assignment the most intriguing novel I've read in many a epoch.
Irvin Yalom has created unadulterated taut, deeply informative page slave. I enthusiastically recommend The Spinoza Problem."
"Irvin Yalom is the virtually significant writer of psychological falsehood in the world today. Unrestrainable didn't think he could top When Nietzsche Wept or The Schopenhauer Cure, on the contrary he has. The Spinoza Problem is grand masterpiece."
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