Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity

Michael Mack (PhD. Cambridge) is Reader in Medical Humanities and English Literature at Durham University, UK. Formerly he has been a Visiting Professor at Syracuse University, a Fellow at the University of Sydney, and lecturer and research fellow at the University of Chicago. He is the author of German Idealism and the Jew (University of Chicago Press, 2003), which was shortlisted for The Koret Jewish Book Award 2004, and Anthropology as Memory (Niemeyer, 2001, Conditio Judaica Series).

• Acknowledgments Introduction Spinoza' alternative modernity Chapter 1. Descartes, Spinoza or the goal that destroys itself. Chapter 2. Spinoza's conatus or the critique of political self-destruction Chapter 3. Herder's Spinozist understanding of Reflection Chapter 4. From the Dissection theatre to popular philosophy or Herder's Spinozist theology Chapter 5. From the National to the Transnational Chapter 6. Universalism contested: Herder, Kant and Race Chapter 7. Talking Humanly with the Devil: From Rosenzweig via Spinoza to Goethe's hospitality in Faust and Iphigenia on Tauris Chapter 8. The Significance of the Insignificant: George Eliot's Daniel Deronda and the Literature of Weimar Classicism Chapter 9. Conclusion: Freud and Spinoza or how to be mindful of the mind.

The book is intended for those with a working knowledge of Spinoza's writings, but it is so diversified that it will also appeal to readers from many different fields... Mack has achieved a masterly presentation of Spinoza's legacy and his alternative modernity, modelled an elegant method for reading philosophy and history adopted from literary studies, and offered compelling arguments that will provoke readers to question many modern assumptions about the human condition.