Diderot and Lessing as Exemplars of a Post-spinozist Mentality
Louise Crowther
ISBN: | 9781906540883 |
Publisher: | Maney Publishing |
Published: | 1 April, 2010 |
Format: | Hardback |
Language: | English |
Diderot and Lessing as Exemplars of a Post-spinozist Mentality
Louise Crowther
Renowned as the chief challenger of traditional views of morality, man's freedom, and religion from 1650-1750, Benedict de Spinoza (1632-77) spread alarm and confusion throughout Europe through his writings. Theologians and rulers desperately sought to ban the spread of Spinozist ideas, and, in the post-Spinozist climate, eighteenth- century thinkers, often exasperated and perplexed, attempted to cope with the fallout from this intellectual explosion. The philosophical radicalism of Denis Diderot (1713-84), a French philosophe, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-81), a German philosopher, well exemplifies the post-Spinozist mentality that permeated eighteenth-century thinking. As they grapple with the loss of intellectual, moral, and theological certainties, Diderot and Lessing re-work post-Spinozist ideas and in many instances elucidate even more radical ideas than Spinoza himself had envisaged.
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