On the Spinoza of Market Street
On The Spinoza of market street
The story is set in a small community of Eastern European Jews of Warsaw, Poland, when the events leading to the beginning of World War I. It is about Dr. Fischelson, a scholar of philosophy who has devoted his life to the study of Spinoza's masterwork, Ethics. Because of his skeptical ideas about religion ,which have been derived from Spinoza, Dr. Fischelson has been fired from his job at the synagogue library and alienated from the Jewish community due to their perception that he is a "heretic."
From the very beginning of the story and also the title itself the name ‘SPINOZA’ attracts the reader’s attention , and it suggests that this name is a key word to understand the story, so before anything, we have to know some about SPINOZA.
( Baruch Spinoza is a Dutch rationalist philosopher and religious thinker, who is accounted the most thoroughgoing modern exponent of pantheism. Spinoza was carefully educated in classical Jewish sources. Later, however, he became alienated from established Judaism as a result of his studies of physical science and the writings of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes and the French scientist and philosopher René Descartes. He withdrew from the synagogue and in 1656 was excommunicated by the rabbis, who secured his banishment from Amsterdam. For five years he remained on the outskirts of the city, supporting himself as a grinder of optical lenses. During this period he wrote his first philosophical work in which the outlines of his developed philosophical system are foreshadowed. Then he was offered by Charles Louis, elector Palatine, a chair in philosophy at the University of Heidelberg. Spinoza declined the post, however, in order to be free from any restrictions on his intellectual activities that might be made by theologians. Spinoza also rejected a pension offered him by Louis XIV, king of France, on the condition that he dedicate one of his works to the monarch.
Spinoza rejected providence and freedom of will, and his concept of an impersonal God was hostilely received by many of his contemporaries. His position in the history of philosophy is in many respects unique. He belonged to no school and founded none. Although to some extent his work was based on that of a few of his predecessors, it is too strikingly individual to be regarded as a mere continuation, even of the thought of Descartes. In...