3 comments about Gurdjieff: A Biography.

1. Having read this twice through, and having read a fair amount of related material, I must say that this is worth the time spent. Without getting lost in the ideas, the author introduced enough of them to be provacative and helpful, while covering the history more throughly than I have seen elsewhere. The book is very well written with good photographs and a great annotation section at the end which is particularly helpful. For those who enjoy fourth way reading, this book has a special place by mining some of the work idea vein while serving primarliy as a means of placing it in history. Definitely gives a good feeling of what an unusual, powerful and challenging man Gurdjieff was.



2. Gurdjieff remains a fascinating figure. Sadly the standard of writing is very poor. I don't know a great deal about the author but he sure ain't a scholar or academic on this evidence. Too much horrible, purple prose. Borrow it rather than buy it. Better still search for one of the few people still alive who can give a personal account of G.



3. I'll just say briefly that this book is the best biographic text of Gurdjieff available, and while it is a bit prolix it is not purple, as someone claimed. Actually I find it almost novelistically readable.

No comments about A New Life Of Dante.

1 comments about On Spinoza (Wadsworth Philosophers Series).

1. 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.

3 comments about Spinoza in 90 Minutes (Philosophers in 90 Minutes).

1. I. Spinoza is a strange and interesting philosopher. His life sticks out in the history of philosophy. He not only philosophized, but he lived his philosophy. Q.E.D.

   II. After an assassination attempt, Spinoza managed to get excommunicated from the Amsterdam synagogue in 1656. Q.E.D.

   III. Spinoza turned down prestigious university posts and instead made his living grinding glass lenses. At the same time he composed a classic metaphysical system that he also applied to a political system. Q.E.D.

   IV. Spinoza was one of the first philosophers to claim that the aim of the state is individual freedom. Q.E.D.

   V. Though Spinoza's metaphysics belong to a different time, it is an example of how a theory of existence can be applied to a manner of living and being. Q.E.D.

   VI. This book provides a good but very short introduction to the life and philosophy of one of the most interesting philosophers in the history books. Q.E.D.

   VII. Spinoza managed to live a very humble life and still attain fame and recognition in his own time. He corresponded with Huygens, Newton, Leibniz, and other eminent people of the 17th century. Q.E.D.

   VIII. Spinoza's works were so controversial they were either not published during his lifetime or published anonymously shortly after his death. Q.E.D.

   IX. Spinoza's metaphysical system was based on pantheism, which posited that everything and everyone is God, so that if you hurt another you hurt yourself. There are corollaries to the modern Gaia hypothesis in this. Q.E.D.

   X. This book will leave you wanting to know more about Spinoza and why he wrote in a strange numbered aphoristic manner. It can be read in a single reading and will acquaint you with Spinoza and why he is considered important. Q.E.D.

   XI. Read this book, then move onto more thorough studies if it catches your interest. Q.E.D.




2. This is a very good short account of the life and work of the philosopher who according to Will Durant was the exception among the great philosophers in that ' he lived in accord with what he wrote'. Strathern tells the story of Spinoza's lonely struggle to be true to his vision of God and Nature. Strathern writes of the famous excommunication from the Portugese Jewish community, the humble life of the lens-grinder, the loyal friend ready to take on mobs to protest against the assassination of the politician DeWitt, the supreme rationalist seeing all ' with the eyes of Eternity.' Spinoza who maintained his meditation was the meditation of a free man and so' a meditation on life and not on death' had a pure vision of God as Nature as All-in- All. His appeal to Goethe and English Romanticism came in part from this. His God is All, and yet sublime and impersonal if not like Joyce's paring his fingernails, then certainly not like the Old Testament Hebrew God intervening to prevent Abraham from taking the life of his only beloved son. In other words the God of Spinoza is a God very much of the philosophers, and not one which Pascal a figure of comparable intellectual intensity and aesthetic greatness would have abided.
   Strathern shows a clear admiration for his subject, and a respect for the subject- matter of his thought. He takes a few jabs, here and there at the great man but not in such a way as to diminish the feeling that we are dealing here one of Mankind's great thinkers.



3. I picked up "Aquinas in 90 Minutes" in our Maui condo laundry room. It was so interesting that I now have St. Thomas Aquinas " Shorter Summa". I then had to have the same " 90 Minute" book for other "favorite philosophers".

No comments about Georges Bataille (Critical Lives).

2 comments about My Search for Bill W.: Biography.

1. From a recovery point of view, this book will not change your program or anything. It's one of those quick knock-offs that someone did when they needed money. I liked Mel B's work on "Pass It On" and the book about Ebby, but she really sold short on this one. You could simply read the chapter titles in this book and you've read the whole thing. And while vaguely illustrating her points, Mel wanders off into conjecture and personal opinion, and admits that's what she's doing!



2. Mel's book My Search for Bill W. is one of the two best Bio's written about Bill W. Any student of spirituality, philosophy, and thought movements in America should make room on their shelves for ALL of Mel's books. Mel's works are exact, insightful and a banquet for the soul. I'm glad I stumbled upon the first book and I'm extremely grateful I've read them all, over and over... I'd be a damn fool if I didn't say; Thanks Mel!

No comments about Mahatma Gandhi: Autobiografia.

No comments about William S. Burroughs - Naked Biography.

1 comments about Descartes: His Life and Thought.

1. Genevieve Rodis-Lew is Professor Emerita at the Sorbonne and has written a splendid biography on the life and thought of a major and influential 17th Century European philosopher. Ably translated into English by Jane Marie Todd, Descartes is vividly presented in the context of his time. Drawing upon his own correspondence, Rodis-Lewis traces his disillusion with the Jesuit scholastic method and his attraction mathematics and then to metaphysics. Descartes emerges for the modern reader as a complete and complex man, so much more than a mere footnote in the history of science or the evolution of western philosophical traditions.

2 comments about Introducing Hegel (Beginners).

1. Enough said. This book is short, simple, and sweet.
   A fantastic launchpad into Hegel's philosophy of history!



2. Introducing Hegel, like all the introducing series provides only an introduction to the philosophy of Hegel. Still, I found it interesting. I now know that Hegel's philosophy is tied to history. History, and humanities progress through it, represents our becoming aware that we are self conscious. History is a process of taking a whole broken into fragments and piecing it together into a whole. Hegel was very interested in Napoleon and the French Revolution. He believed the struggle by the oppressed was a struggle for recognition. As the oppressed are the ones who have made the world, they are the ones who benefit most from the experience of history. This aspect of his work is represented in the Master and the Slave where one "person" gets control of another "person" and forces him to do work. But in forcing him to do so the Master becomes dependent on the slave and meanwhile the slave learns the self respect that comes from working. So in the end the Master becomes even more dependent on the slave and the slave becomes free. I think the purpose of the introducing series is to whet your appetite for more and this book certainly has done so. Hegel is a fascinating person and his ideas are well worth exploring.