Alex points me to this Rebecca Goldstein op-ed in The New York Times marking the excommunication of Baruch Spinoza. I am actually reading Goldstein's biography of Spinoza, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, and just finished Matthew Stewart's The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World. Most of you probably know the name Spinoza from Einstein's assertion that he "believe in Spinoza's God," the pantheistic entity which suffused existence itself.Update: James H. has more at The Island of Doubt.
Stewart, and Goldstein from what I can gather (see the subtitle of her book), both argue that Spinoza was the predecessor of the 18th century Enlightenment, the intellectual flowering which serves in many ways as the bedrock for modernity as such. I tend to believe this is true, and though Spinoza's a priori philosophy as worked out in Ethics leaves ...
