Article: A chance and fateful meeting: author examines an epochal encounter between two philosophers.(The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World)(Book review)

THE COURTIER AND THE HERETIC: LEIBNIZ, SPINOZA, AND THE FATE OF GOD IN THE MODERN WORLD

By Matthew Stewart

W.W. Norton & Company, 320 pages, $25.95

The two philosophers could hardly have been more different.

Baruch de Spinoza, born in Amsterdam in 1632, was a descendent of Jews who had fled the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions for the relative freedom of the Dutch Republic. A precocious student of the Jewish school at Amsterdam, fluent in Hebrew and thoroughly versed in the Bible, he was excommunicated from the Jewish community at age 24 for his heretical beliefs about the nature of God, the origins of the Bible and his rejection of ...

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