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Title: Spinoza: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Roger Scruton ISBN: 0-19-280316-6 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: July, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $9.95

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Average Customer Rating: 3.38 (8 reviews)

Rating: 3
Summary: If this book is so bad why arn't there more used copies?
Comment: If this book is so bad why arn't people selling their used copies at low, low prices on amazon.com?? This author seems to be able to put forward a different point of view that makes people think.Unfortunatly because it is an Introductory book the people who read it seem not to want to do so. Perhaps Roger S. should have saved his thoughts for more enlightened readers.

Rating: 1
Summary: Luckily, it will not be reprinted
Comment: Roger Scruton's book on Spinoza is a waste of time. As a professor of philosophy Scruton should surely have come up with something better than this. It does not serve to explain Spinoza's thought, and it betrays the point of the series that it belongs to when it obstinately refuses to explicate Spinoza's works. This book should never have been published, and this will no doubt be its final printing. Spinoza is the pivotal philosopher who mediates between early modern philosophy and that of the Enlightenment period, which he belonged to as one of its most important players. Luckily, other modestly priced and thorough accounts of Spinoza already exist: the Cambridge Companion to Spinoza (from which Scruton is noticably absent) and the wonderfully researched biography entitled Spinoza: A Life, by Steven Nadler. This latter book follows in the methodological footseps of the medievalist historian Johan Huizinga, who wrote such benchmark books on intellectual history as Erasmus and the Age of Reformation and The Autumn of the Middle Ages. A third book to consider, one that places elements of Spinoza's philosophy in the proper context of his Enlightenment contemporaries, is Jonathan Israel's book Radical Enlightenment. Spinoza's thought has recently been revived in other countries, most notably in France, and for this reason his work and its influence are currently being taught at the university level in humanities departments as diverse as film studies, literature, and of course philosophy. The essential work to own by Spinoza is his Ethics, edited, translated and annotated by the scholar GHR Parkinson.

Rating: 1
Summary: Short Intro? No, long criticism!
Comment: This essay is more about Roger Scruton's ideas about Spinoza's philosophy that about Spinoza's philosophy itself. He spends too much of this short book on criticism of Spinoza's geometric method of presentation and hardly any on his vision.
Typically he says on the last page of the book that "it is no accident that Spinoza should have called forth so sharp an attack from the other false prophet of atheism, Nietzsche," and concludes with a quote from Nietzsche.
If Scruton considers Spinoza a "false prophet of atheism" he has self-confessed an ignorance of Spinoza's work.

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