Book Description
'This book is both a fine introduction to the me taphysics of Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz and a rich, wide-ranging study of the interaction betwee n physics and metaphysics in the seventeenth centu ry.' - Kenneth P Winkler, Wellesley College ... Read more

Book Description
This book examines the issue of whether he was the 'first secular Jew.' It unveils the presence of Spinoza's philosophical revolution in the work of later thinkers who helped shape the modern mind. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Very insightful
Chevrin and Kevane (authors of Love of Wisdom: An Introduction to Christian Philosophy) were absolutely right and did not exaggerate to regard Spinoza as a formidable foe. No Christian can or should sympathize with his pantheistic views. Spinoza's influence on subsequent thinkers is over-arching; his hostility to transcendence needs to be reciprocated bytheistic thinkers' open disavowal and rejection of his immanentist philosophy. In the literary production of this brilliant thinker we have a prime example of the incompatibility of Eastern and Western world views. We theists should watch his ideas the same way we watch animals in the wild: from a safe distance.
Spinoza was an avowed enemy of revealed religion: he used biblical hermeneutics as a weapon, in his fight against theism. To him, historia sacra was just a myth; messianism a misguided illusion; miracles a pious thing, explainable through natural causes. To him God, was an immanent substance, eternal, not liable to change, and yet lacking personal self-consciousness; it is devoid of personality, subjectivity and spirit; it is identical with reality. Accoridng to Spinoza God is a pure being involving no negation. Spinoza distinguished between:
a)Vera religio: attained by a few, nurtured by an amor dei intellectualis. It is an idea vera.
b)Religio catholica: the result of imaginatio, it consists in putting into practice social beliefs borrowed from Scriptures (justice, mutual help and obedience to the laws of the state). Thus, religion can be useful.
c)Superstitio: it entails belief in miracles, teleology, historical religion, immortality of the soul, belief in the "Son of God. Spinoza's immanent revolution set the ground for later thinkers, who sought to construe the philosophy of immanence either more coherently or still more radically to new areas (Economics, Depth Psychology, Ethics). The brilliant author of this book, Yovel, proceeds to map a list of alternatives by which a philosophy of immanence can be built. (p.171)
How did Spinoza influence later thinkers?
Kant= He built his own philosophy of immanence, which was both human-centered and anti-naturalistic. He wanted to build a system of rational ethics (based on morality and on absolute imperatives) on the ruins of metaphysics. He professed and preached intellectual agnosticism. He bitterly criticized Judaism, Catholicism and the Byzantine Church. Later on in his life, he also rejected Pietism. Kant believed that the rational attitude can be propagated on a massive historical scale (Spinoza saw it as the privilege of a few).
Hegel= God, the Absolute, is spirit, not a substance, but an organic and conscious subject. Hegel attempted a dialectical critique of Spinoza, by encompassing it, not by denying it: "When beginning to philosophize, one must first be a Spinozist"(p.29, 32).The Absolute must not be conceived as a ready made beginning, but as a result. According to Hegel, the Absolute produces itself as absolute in the process of History; he is a becoming God. God attains self-knowledge and actualizes himself through human history. Historical pantheism: God deifies history rather than nature. The totality must be conceived as a siubject. If totality is pure affirmation, with no inner differences, than his exclusion of negativity must lead to a Parmenidean kind of unity, wiping out all distinctions and making all finite entities, change and dynamisms ontologically impossible (Advaita Vedanta: Nirguna Brahman; Acosmism).
Marx= Spinoza is always present in Marx's thought (p.79). Homo oeconomicus. Marx made the economic substratum into an arche', the first principle, the foundation of the realm of immanence. Emphasis on natura naturata.
Nietzsche= Speaking of his "ancestors," he always mentioned Goethe and Spinoza. This worldliness is co-extensive with being in general. Why should a world of pure immanence be conceived as a rational and organized totality? He rejected not only God, but "god's shadows"(meaning, moral world, order, fixed law, truth, rationality). Man exists in an ever-transient flux of "will to power" or in a metaphysical wasteland. (p.123)
The will to power is a drive toward self-transcendence, but not in the style of Kant, the Stoics and Christianity's morality and asceticism. It does not impose external constraints upon life and the emotions, but lets life reshape and sublimate itself. Man is his own creator, in the state of "self-being without God." Nietzsche wasa modern Heraclitus, though he denied the logos or fixed rational order presiding over the world flux (ETERNAL RECURRENCE, p. 124-27).
Freud= Human beings are moved by a dominant, natural striving or source of energy (libido vs. Spinoza's conatus). Atheism must resign itself to man's impotence in the universe without seeking illusory compensations. Empedocles' love and hatred are replaced by Freud's own version of dualism of eros and thanatos; Spinoza stuck to absolute monism.
Macchiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and Sartre are philosophers of the "dark enlightenment", in that they challenge the "divine part" in man and its alleged origin in a transcendent realm. Each worked to shatter complacent self-images, comforting illusions and claimed to have found something dark and unsettling about the structure of man and of the world.

A Great Vehicle to Appreciate Spinoza's Influence
Much despised during the century after his death in 1677, Spinoza has become an inspiration to so many of the world's greatest minds from the late 18th century on to the present.In Volume II of Spinoza and Other Heretics, Yirmiyahu Yovel explores some of these relationships. From Hegel, to Marx, to Nietzsche to Freud, Yovel demonstrates how huge a debt many of Western Culture's greatest thinkers owed to Spinoza.But Yovel doesn't just chronicle facts; he puts forth a thesis.To Yovel, the most profound heresies that took wings during the past two hundred years have been grounded in Spinoza's philosophy of "immanence." By that term, Yovel refers to the view that the reality of our world, not some transcendent noumenal realm, is the best foundation for our values and beliefs.

Yovel quotes Hegel in saying that "when beginning to philosophize, one must first be a Spinozist."If you assume that all serious philosophers need to embrace their share of heresies, perhaps that Hegelian statement provides the subtext of the entire book.

For me, Yovel was quite successful in demonstrating his thesis and in proving to all of us Spinoza lovers that we are not alone.While I hate to be critical of such a marvelous book, I am compelled to point out a rather strange omission.In running through a litany of thinkers who have been influenced by Spinoza over the years, Yovel devotes little space to one of Spinoza's greatest disciples, Goethe.It was during Goethe's young adulthood in Germany that Spinoza's name was resuscitated as a God intoxicated man after many years when he was thought to resemble the devil. By all accounts, Goethe simply adored Spinoza and the latter was largely responsible for cementing some of Goethe's own heretical views.

Yovel missed quite an opportunity to discuss the Spinoza-Goethe relationship in depth.Nietzsche, for one, would have been furious at the omission.

Insights Of AGreat Mind
This book is in a simple language for all,full of insights and makes you think after you closed the book.
Wide knowledge of the writer about Shpinoza and the feelinfg the writer loves the subject makes you fall in love as well.

Invisible Man
Spinoza has suffered a strange fate. He is the invisible man of modern philosophy. Resolving his riddle as it is concealed in the later work of modern philosophy requires some detective work and Yovel's account, the second volume of his series, acutely traces the underground stream of influence through Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzche, Freud, and others. The first volume on the Marrano's and Spinoza's background is the author's intriguing starting point. Much modern philosophy hardly makes sense without putting putting a tracer on some key notions, they lead back to Spinoza, a point all too clear to Hegel, who is otherwise incomprehensible. Modern science can handly him, yet he prophesies its limitations. The book has a brisk pace, and is a surefooted guide to a field that requires a great deal of legwork. This digest of such a huge field is a fascinating study of a puzzle most seem to wish unsolved. ... Read more

Book Description
This ambitious study presents Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) as the most outstanding and influential thinker of modernity--and examines the question of whether he was the "first secular Jew." A number-one bestseller in Israel, Spinoza and Other Heretics is made up of two volumes--The Marrano of Reason and The Adventures of Immanence offered as a set and also separately. Yirmiyahu Yovel, Professor of Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, shows how Spinoza grounded a philosophical revolution in a radically new principle--the philosophy of immanence, or the idea that this world is all there is--and how he thereby anticipated secularization, the Enlightenment, the disintegration of ghetto life, and the rise of natural science and the liberal-democratic state. The Marrano of Reason The Marrano of Reason finds the origins of the idea of immanence in the culture of Spinoza's Marrano ancestors, Jews in Spain and Portugal who had been forcibly converted to Christianity. Yovel uses their fascinating story to show how the crypto-Jewish life they maintained in the face of the Inquisition mixed Judaism and Christianity in ways that undermined both religions and led to rational skepticism and secularism. He identifies Marrano patterns that recur in Spinoza in a secularized context: a "this- worldly" disposition, a split religious identity, an opposition between inner and outer life, a quest for salvation outside official doctrines, and a gift for dual language and equivocation. This same background explains the drama of the young Spinoza's excommunication from the Jewish community in his native Amsterdam. Convention portrays the Amsterdam Jews as narrow-minded and fanatical, but in Yovel's vivid account they emerge as highly civilized former Marranos with cosmopolitan leanings, struggling to renew their Jewish identity and to build a "new Jerusalem" in the Netherlands. ... Read more

Book Description
In this intriguing book, Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd show us that in spite of-or rather because of-Spinoza's apparent strangeness, his philosophy can be a rich source for cultural self-understanding in the present. Collective Imaginings draws on recent reassessments of the philosophy of Spinoza and develops new ways of conceptualizing issues of freedom and difference. These newly contextualized theories are easily applied to contemporary issues, such as environmental debates, issues of feminism, the conception of democracy, and the idea of the individual and community, providing relevance to our everyday lives.
A fine counter to the 'read and raid' and the 'read and destroy' schools of history of philosophy . . . a careful interpretation of Spinoza that helps resolve contemporary problems about the relation between (what we think of as) the individual and the conflicts and harmony that form social life. -- Amélie Rorty, Brandeis University
A fresh look at Spinoza and how his thoughtis applicable today ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Massive and thorough.
Harry Austryn Wolfson's massive two-volume commentary on Baruch Spinoza was originally published in 1934, and it is still one of the best. It is certainly one of the most thorough: Wolfson leaves no stone unturned in hisexamination of what Spinoza said and what he meant by it.

LocatingSpinoza on the cusp between the medieval and the modern worlds, hemaintains that Spinoza is at once the last of the medievals and the firstof the moderns. Tagging these two aspects of Spinoza's thought"Baruch" and "Benedictus," Wolfson argues that in orderto understand what "Benedictus" says, it is necessary toreconstruct what has "passed through the mind of Baruch."

Andthat is just what Wolfson attempts to do. His work is a systematic andbasically self-explanatory presentation of what Spinoza said and thought,with the _Ethics_ naturally taken as the central text in need ofexplication. With monumental thoroughness, Wolfson dissects Spinoza'swritings on numerous matters of philosophy and theology and (mosthelpfully) compares his thought on many points with that of MosesMaimonides (whom Wolfson names as one of the three dominant influences onSpinoza's thought, the other two being Descartes and -- sometimesindirectly -- Aristotle). And in general, Wolfson's familiarity withrelevant Jewish philosophical literature is a tremendous asset put to gooduse.

Wolfson concludes his examination with a chapter entitled,"What is New in Spinoza?" Here he argues that Spinoza undertookthree "acts of daring" by way of repairing breaks within theunity and homogeneity of nature as conceived by his predecessors: hedeclared that God has the attribute of extension as well as of thought; hedenied design and purpose in God; and he insisted on the completeinseparability of the soul from the body. That Spinoza thereby departedfrom the traditional theologies of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, andwhat implications this departure has for Spinoza's rational theology, isthe subject of the remainder of the closing chapter.

In portions of hiswork, Wolfson tends to rely on psychological rather than philosophicalexplanation in order to set out why Spinoza holds certain views. This is insome respects a defensible approach (and Wolfson, of course, does defendit). However, Wolfson's work should probably be supplemented by a goodcommentary on purely philosophical questions. It is too bad H.H. Joachim's_Study of the Ethics of Spinoza_ is no longer in print, for it fills thebill admirably. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A most interesting Spinoza.
To start with I should say that usually, almost invariably, I am disappointed by collections. This was not the case here. In any book on Spinoza one is usually in danger of encountering either the mystical Spinoza (that God-intoxicated man) or the philosopher that fills in the Triptych of Continental Rationalism (with Descartes and Leibniz) that one finds in those horrid `History of Philosophy' textbooks. Not here.

This is the materialist and `political' Spinoza; and among the interpreters are Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar, Gilles Deleuze and Antonio Negri. All men - with Deleuze one can perhaps make some small equivocation/qualification - of the left. But was Spinoza himself a man of the Left? The essays of Pierre-Francois Moreau, Gabriel Albiac, and Andre Tosel, who, I think, are fairly unknown in the English-speaking world, seem to leave us some room for doubt. (Due to the limitations of (Amazon's) space and (my) time I will give only partial reviews of each of these last three authors.)

The essay by Moreau - Fortune and the Theory of History - begins where the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus begins "If human beings could govern all their affairs according to a fixed plan, or if fortune were always favorable to them, they would be bound by no superstition." We begin in the variable, but repetitive and real (effective) world of Machiavelli. The enemy is superstition; but is this enemy external to Man or our permanent companion? If it were a permanent companion, or fact, of human history, then the philosophers would be forced to write rhetorically, or esoterically, given the inherent limitations of non-philosophers. But are all non-philosophers limited? Moreau cites Spinoza's discussion of Alexander, his reversion to superstition in the face of battlefield reversals, and allows us to draw our own conclusions. And lest we forget, Machiavelli himself, in his Prince, has some mockery reserved for Alexander the Great. ...But do these philosophers write esoterically and/or rhetorically due to the permanence of superstition? I think yes but Moreau draws a different conclusion. Moreau doesn't believe the effects of fortune are immutable. "But what will happen if, through a succession of circumstances initially due to chance, an entire society comes to enjoy security?" ...Would a Spinoza or Machiavelli believe in this miracle?

The much longer essay by Albiac - The Empty Synagogue - begins with a very intelligent discussion of Schelling's `Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom' and the discussion therein of Spinoza by Schelling. This pairing is especially interesting because it puts the esoteric Spinoza in the ring with the dialectical Schelling. The esoteric versus the dialectical; this is the great onto/methodological controversy of modern philosophy. ...And so little written on it! But Albiac is here more concerned with opposition of transcendental materialism/idealism. For Schelling freedom is an ontological category, not a matter of will or anthropology. ...So, exactly how does this differ from Spinoza? Albiac reminds us that Schelling says Spinozism, "is not fatalism because it lets things be conceived in God; for ...pantheism does not make formal freedom, at least, impossible. ...The error ...[is] due to the fact that that they are things." (By this Schelling means they are not conceived of as moving Spirit.) But Schelling is forced to make the irrational the ground of God Himself! Pointing at the silence of Schelling after this remarkable essay on Freedom Albiac says that the price Schelling pays for this maneuver is silence. Now, this is merely the beginning of the essay and Albiac goes on to make several intelligent points for Spinoza; see especially the discussion of Spinoza's conception of Power. Highly recommended!

The slightly shorter essay by Tosel - Superstition and Reading - is also highly recommended. This is an essay on esotericism! As such Tosel quotes, with approval, the groundbreaking study of Spinoza by Leo Strauss. (Strauss also receives a backhanded compliment from Negri in the notes of his essay.) Tosel - and this is quite hilarious, given the numerological fantasies (the most important thing is written in the middle of the piece) of some esoteric readers `influenced' by Strauss - at almost the exact center of the essay writes "Can or must the indications given in the TTP [Tractatus Theologico-Politicus] on the method of interpretation of Scripture be applied to the TTP itself? Leo Strauss also new how to pose the decisive question." Well, when you stop laughing you realize that what Tosel is (perhaps) indicating is that there can be no `un-superstitious' (or simply intelligible) texts in a superstitious world. "Everywhere that the mastery of circumstances of life is difficult, the unintelligible is reproduced." Tosel (naturally) ends his essay, in good dialectical/progressive fashion, "One must thus make possible for the future the reading of the TTP as a partially intelligible text that contains within it the means to reduce this unintelligibility, since it states what rules of reading should be followed for unintelligible texts."

After reading these essays and the others one should tackle the books by both Deleuze and Strauss on Spinoza. Also included in this collection, btw, are essays by Luce Irigaray, Emilia Giancotti, Pierre Macherey, and Alexander Matheron. ... Read more

Book Description
This brief text assists students in understanding Spinoza's philosophy and thinking so that they can more fully engage in useful, intelligent class dialogue and improve their understanding of course content. Part of the "Wadsworth Philosophers Series," (which will eventually consist of approximately 100 titles, each focusing on a single "thinker" from ancient times to the present), ON SPINOZA is written by a philosopher deeply versed in the philosophy of this key thinker. Like other books in the series, this concise book offers sufficient insight into the thinking of a notable philosopher better enabling students to engage in the reading and to discuss the material in class and on paper. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A nice addition to the Wadsworth series
Diane Steinberg's excellent little introduction to Spinoza is, in terms of "technicalness," at about the next level up from Roger Scruton's fine volume. The reader unfamiliar with Spinoza but possessing some background in philosophy may prefer to start with this volume rather than with Scruton's, although on the whole I still like Scruton's a little better.

In just ninety-three pages, Steinberg covers the gamut of Spinoza's thought. She devotes an introductory chapter to a short account of his life, and then dedicates a chapter each to his metaphysics, his views of mind and body, his psychology, his ethics, and his philosophical methodology. The presentation is solid and tight.

One advantage over Scruton's older introduction, by the way, is that Steinberg has taken into account certain more recent works on Spinoza -- including material from the conferences at the Jerusalem Spinoza Institute of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (edited by Yirmiyahu Yovel), and the disagreement between Jonathan Bennett and Edwin Curley about the exact nature of "attributes" and "modes" in Spinoza's thought. (This is also the sort of thing I have in mind when I say Steinberg's introduction is a bit more technical than Scruton's, so the advantage may be a disadvantage for some readers.)

On the whole, then, this well-executed little book is a welcome addition to the recent Spinoza literature.

However, through (I assume) no fault of the author's, it suffers from some stupendously poor editing/proofreading. The widespread use of word-processing software has made possible an entirely new class of typographical error, and it seems that the folks at Wadsworth haven't quite caught up.

For example, on a quick skim through the book, I found four or five places in which a double hyphen hasn't been properly replaced by an em-dash. More seriously, the bottom half of p. 22 is left blank for no good reason -- not, one presumes, because there is any text missing, but because there is a page break in the text at this point that somebody forgot to delete. And on the bottom of p. 47, we find the first seven words of a boldface section heading: "Substance Monism and the Doctrine of Mode." The last word -- "Identity" -- is stranded alone at the top of p. 48, where the new section actually begins.

(There are also a handful of minor misspellings, mostly in the textual citations from Spinoza: "th" for "the," "bu" for "but," and so forth. And I won't list the occasional grammatical oddities that appear here and there throughout the text.)

Let's hope Wadsworth corrects this stuff in future editions of the book. It's distracting. ... Read more

Book Description
Explores Jewish aspects of Spinoza's philosophy from a wide variety of perspectives. ... Read more

Book Description
Spinoza's philosophy has an undeserved reputation for being obscure and incomprehensible.But now, in this indispensable collection, Spinoza is portrayed in the manner he deserves--as a brilliant metaphysician who paved the way for an exciting new science.The volume focuses on several important areas, including monism, the concept of conatus, the nature of and the relation between mind and body, and Spinoza's relationship to Descartes and Leibniz.The new physics posed difficult questions about the existence and power of God; however, it was commonplace of seventeenth-century metaphysics to claim that all force was God's.In his philosophy, Spinoza solves this problem, identifying God with nature.But, what happens to individuals after that identification?And what is an individual for Spinoza?How does it act?How are its actions explained?This volume clearly addresses these and other fascinating questions.It explores Spinoza's account of the relationship between mind and body, along with his view on the ontology of values.Spinoza saw the threat of deterministic physics to mind-body interaction.How is it possible that minds act on bodies and vice versa?Furthermore, the volume examines the problem of the nature of values, asking is there room for an independent realm of values in the new philosophy? Finally, the collection investigates problems in the interpretation of Spinoza that stem from Spinoza's debatable place in seventeenth-century philosophy; it is often claimed that Spinoza's ideas evolved from Cartesian doctrines while profoundly influencing Leibniz.With a stellar group of contributors--including Michael Della Rocca, John Carriero, Richard Mason, Steven Barbone, Don Garrett, Olli Koistinen, Richard Manning, Peter Dalton, Charles Jarrett, Charles Huenemann, and Mark Kulstad--this volume serves as an excellent resource and represents the best work of a new generation of Spinoza scholars. ... Read more

Book Description

Customer Reviews (3)

Believe some pompous reviews
The major stylistic shortcoming of Howie's work is not really its dryness, but rather its unkind, often mocking tone, as the other bad review on this page points out.

Most of that review, actually, refers to Todd May's review of this book. May points out how mean and pointless Howie's attacks on Deleuze and on what she takes to be the wankiness of postmodern culture (see the noted reference to Gaia, etc.) are.

May's main purpose, though, is to unbind Deleuze from Spinoza and so defend him from Howie. May also discusses the absence of an equivalent concept to 'attribute' in Deleuze's later work. I don't agree; there are, for example, the 'schemata' in Deleuze's book on Foucault, as well as affirmation/negation, which mediates between the will to power and action/reaction in his book on Nietzsche. Both of those concepts are praised by Deleuze and either could be seen as versions of the 'attribute.' Speaking in his own voice, Deleuze's 'problems' in Difference and Repetition are sometimes spoken of as though they are 'attributes' constituting solutions as 'modes' to the problematic field as 'substance.' Other times, 'problems' sound more like 'modes'. But I'm not as sure as May is that Deleuze has thoroughly exorcised the 'attribute' from his thinking after his work on Spinoza.

My main point is that one shouldn't go overboard with May's defence of Deleuze, which operates by distinguishing his thinking from Spinoza's. Howie could certainly argue that the distinction is not as clear-cut as May says.

On the other hand, I think Spinoza himself can be defended from Howie. Her opening argument, against 'parallelism', upon which many of her further arguments depend, is not so good. It is based on Spinoza's inability to establish the univocity of substance and the reality of formal distinction at the same time. A much clearer defence of that thesis than Deleuze's can be found in Edwin Curley's "Behind the Geometric Method." Curley's defence is nothing like Deleuze's but if one looks closely, one sees that it has the same ingredients: the ontolgical argument for the single substance with infinite attributes, the impossibility of a substance having more than one but less than infinite attributes, and the bizarre tension between the absolute self-sufficiency of each attribute and the univocity of substance whose essence comprises all/infinite attributes--a tension which Curley also believes turns on the word "expression."

Howie claims at the end of her first chapter that Spinoza, far from proving the univocity of single substance, has not even proven that a substance exists. This is odd--Spinoza's proof of the single substance is his ontological argument; it has nothing to do with questions about formal distinction. In fact, the complex question of the distinction of attributes only arises in response to the necessary existence of a substance consisting of infinite attributes (otherwise one could simply say, with Descartes, that each attribute pertains to its own unique substance.) Howie could have a go at disputing the ontological argument, but I can't find anywhere in the book where she does.

Don't believe pompous reviews
The previous reviewer is mean spirited. Even if the book is not written in the most exhilirating style, it is one among many points of view. The reviewer's politics are obvious and interfering with his ability to appreciate. The bilge is all his.

Awful
First, pragmatic issues: this book is very expensive, and I bought it, and no one else has reviewed it, and I was shocked by what I bought, so you fair prospectives should be adequately forewarned.Second: this book is dry, dry, dry; the style would off-put Carnap and the interminable graduate school nitpicking is so endless that it winds up being more annoying than profound.
Let me slow down.This is a book that is supposed to be a kind of critique of Deleuze from an obviously Critical Theory-ish perspective (e.g. "Aura," Adorno you know, blah blah).It might be.I honestly have no idea because I have no idea what Howie is talking about.Deleuze is unrecognizeable here, a sort of statue of him remains with one arm, a fig leaf, and half his head cracked off.And Spinoza comes off much the same.Furthermore, if one is diligent enough to waft through the miles of tangled and confusing minutiae that no one is interested in except...Howie?...if one gets through all that, one realizes that this endeavor was futile, because Howie just flat-out dislikes Deleuze, and wants to crack his nut, so to speak, leaving the book one grand Thema Probandum not worth the lives of the trees that died to print it.I do think Howie, and Critical Theory in general, does and should have interesting ideas on and problems with Deleuze, but suggesting that his reading of Spinoza is the key to his whole philosophy borders on exegetical cruelty.Deleuze didn't simply make Spinoza the mouthpiece for his own views, nor did he do this with other dozen or so people he wrote on--as, e.g., can be seen in his utter disregard for the "Attributes" in his indpendent works, and almost exlusive focus on modes.I for one would love to hear a cogent critique od Deleuze that truly grappled with the complexity of his work--imagine Adorno on Deleuze, for instance.But you will not hear this here--and no, you do not get points for claiming "one viewpoint among many" (and Howie least of all would claim this, mind you) if the viewpoint is on a strawman--so, fine, I'll revise.If this is your sort of thing, go for it.But don't be surprised if you learn next to nothing about Deleuze, or, if you know Deleuze, you find the subject of attack in this book an alien figure.And furthermore (this is another revision of my earlier review), the mean-spiritedness I claim is evident in this book is not just a term I threw out casually.Howie claims in numerous places that Deleuze deliberately mystified people and enchanted them with this "aura," and also that he was knowingly distorting views and in general dishonest and disingenuous.Make of that what you will.Still bilge. ... Read more