“We excommunicate, expel, curse and damn Baruch de Espinoza, with the consent of God, Blessed be He, and with the consent of the entire holy congregation .. Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down and cursed be he when he rises up. Cursed be he when he goes out and cursed be he when he comes in .. and the Lord shall blot out his name from under heaven.”
from the text of Spinoza’s excommunication (1656)
“Baruch (or Benedict de) Spinoza (1632-1677) is one of the most original, forward-looking and hard-to-classify thinkers in the entire history of Western philosophy. Often lumped together with Descartes and Leibniz under the text-book heading “seventeenth-century continental rationalist”, he fits that description in certain ways, such as his steadfast adherence to the rationalist “way of ideas”, but definitely not in others, such as his resolutely holding out against Cartesian mind/body dualism in any guise .. Hence Spinoza’s remarkably modern conception of the mind as in some sense an “idea of the body” and of the body as likewise an “idea of the mind”, neither of which can exist in isolation from the other.”
more via tpm: spinoza
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