Rebecca Goldstein is discussing Spinoza right now on C-Span 2 for all you philosophy nerds (like me). Butter.
I'm split on my opinion on Spinoza. While rationalism has some decent tenets, I'm not a huge fan of determinism, even though I know it's probably right. He spent to much time blabbing on about the vaguely defined "substance". He was clearly ahead of his time, as the "one substance" could be a mention of strings, quarks, atoms, etc, while rationalism has become the groundwork for much of science and determinism is a probability because we're all biological machines, but for some reason I have issues with him for reasons I can't figure out.
Perhaps it was this idea of rationalism as a way to save us all. This conceptual perception of "radical" objectivity.Everything has a rational basis to him. He envisioned a world with no mystery. How inhuman is that?
