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Born in Amsterdam in 1634, Benedict Spinoza continues to be one of the most admired thinkers. His work, including the Ethics, the Tractatus Theologico Politicus and the Political Treatise that we present in this volume are widely read and the subject of philosophical, political, religious and psychological studies, not only by fellow philosophers but also by writers and poets.
Famous writers and poets became admirers and followers of Spinoza, particularly Lessing, Heine, Auerbach, Coleridge, Shelley, George Eliot and many more. Robert Harvey Monro Elwes a renowned XIX century English scholar and the English translator of Spinoza’s works, in his Introduction to the Tractatus Theologico Politicus (included in this book) wrote that these poets and intellectuals not only admired him but studied him deeply. Shelley not only contemplated but began a translation of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, to be published with a preface by Lord Byron, but the project was cut short by his death.
to be a philosopher one must first be a Spinozist. .
G. W. F. Hegel
I, at last, chanced upon the Ethica of this man. To say exactly how much I gained from that work was due to Spinoza or to my reading of him would be impossible; enough that I found in him a sedative for my passions and that he appeared to me to open up a large and free outlook on the material and moral world.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Spinoza, like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, on whose lives and philosophy I have based two earlier novels, wrote much that is highly relevant to my field of psychiatry and psychotherapy–for example, that ideas, thoughts, and feelings are caused by previous experiences, that passions may be studied dispassionately, that understanding leads to transcendence–and I wished to celebrate his contributions through a novel of ideas.
Irvin D. Yalom, from his novel The Spinoza Problem
