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Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity. New York: Schocken, 2009.
Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese origin, is considered one of the great rationalists of seventeenth-century philosophy, laying the groundwork for the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and modern biblical criticism. By virtue of his magnum opus, the posthumous Ethics, in which he opposed Descartes' mind-body dualism, Spinoza is considered to be one of Western philosophy's most important philosophers. Philosopher and historian...