Diderot and Lessing as Exemplars of a Post-Spinozist Mentality
Louise Crowther
Click cover to enlarge Buy hardback at: | MHRA Texts and Dissertations 78 Maney Publishing for the Modern Humanities Research Association 6 September 2010 • 190pp ISBN: 978-1-906540-88-3 (hardback) • RRP £34.99, $48.99, €41.99 EnlightenmentFrenchGermanPhilosophyFiction Renowned as the chief challenger of traditional views of morality, man’s freedom, and religion from 1650-1750, Benedict de Spinoza (1632-77) spread alarm and confusion throughout Europe through his writings. Theologians and rulers desperately sought to ban the spread of Spinozist ideas, and, in the post-Spinozist climate, eighteenth-century thinkers, often exasperated and perplexed, attempted to cope with the fallout from this intellectual explosion. The philosophical radicalism of Denis Diderot (1713-84), a French philosophe, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-81), a German philosopher, well exemplifies the post-Spinozist mentality that permeated eighteenth-century thinking. As they grapple with the loss of intellectual, moral, and theological certainties, Diderot and Lessing re-work post-Spinozist ideas and in many instances elucidate even more radical ideas than Spinoza himself had envisaged. Louise Crowther is an Associate Lecturer in French language and contemporary history at Manchester Metropolitan University. Bibliography entry: Crowther, Louise, Diderot and Lessing as Exemplars of a Post-Spinozist Mentality, MHRA Texts and Dissertations, 78 (MHRA, 2010) First footnote reference: 35 Louise Crowther, Diderot and Lessing as Exemplars of a Post-Spinozist Mentality, MHRA Texts and Dissertations, 78 (MHRA, 2010), p. 21. Subsequent footnote reference: 37 Crowther, p. 47. (To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.) Bibliography entry: Crowther, Louise. 2010. Diderot and Lessing as Exemplars of a Post-Spinozist Mentality, MHRA Texts and Dissertations, 78 (MHRA) Example citation: ‘A quotation occurring on page 21 of this work’ (Crowther 2010: 21). Example footnote reference: 35 Crowther 2010: 21. (To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.) This title was first published by Maney Publishing for the Modern Humanities Research Association but rights to it are now held by Modern Humanities Research Association. This title is now out of print. Permanent link to this title: www.mhra.org.uk/publications/Diderot-Lessing-as-Exemplars-Post-Spinozist-Mentality www.mhra.org.uk/publications/td-78 |
