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The Courtier and the Heretic
- Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World
- Narrated by: Graham Rowat
- Length: 13 hrs and 3 mins
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Publisher's summary
Once upon a time, philosophy was a dangerous business-and for no one more so than for Baruch Spinoza, the seventeenth-century philosopher vilified by theologians and political authorities everywhere as "the atheist Jew." As his inflammatory manuscripts circulated underground, Spinoza lived a humble existence in The Hague, grinding optical lenses to make ends meet. Meanwhile, in the glittering salons of Paris, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was climbing the ladder of courtly success. In between trips to the opera and groundbreaking work in mathematics, philosophy, and jurisprudence, he took every opportunity to denounce Spinoza, relishing his self-appointed role as "God's attorney."
In this exquisitely written philosophical romance of attraction and repulsion, greed and virtue, religion and heresy, Matthew Stewart gives narrative form to an epic contest of ideas that shook the seventeenth century—and continues today.
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A brilliant schoolboy in 17th-century Amsterdam, Bento Spinoza⏤formally Baruch and later Benedict de Spinoza⏤quickly learns to keep his ideas to himself. When he is 23, those ideas prove so scandalous to his own Jewish community that he is cast out, cursed, and effectively erased from their communal life. The scandal shows no sign of waning as his ideas spread throughout Europe. At the center of the storm, he lives the simplest of lives, quietly devoted to his work as a lens grinder and to his steadfast search for truth, striving to embody a philosophy of tolerance and benevolence.
By: Devra Lehmann
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A Theologico-Political Treatise/A Political Treatise
- By: Baruch Spinoza
- Narrated by: Leighton Pugh
- Length: 16 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Though it first aroused anger and controversy rather than admiration and acceptance, A Theologico-Political Treatise was a landmark in the analysis of theology (with particular reference to the Bible and its Jewish and Christian interpretations) and its relationship to philosophy and politics. Spinoza’s scholarly analysis, based on careful study, demonstrated that the Bible was composed by many writers over the centuries - and that even the Pentateuch, the first five books, were not the work of Moses, as was generally assumed at the time.
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Great until the last ~2 minutes
- By Julia S. on 06-02-22
By: Baruch Spinoza
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Infinite Powers
- How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe
- By: Steven Strogatz
- Narrated by: Bob Souer
- Length: 10 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Infinite Powers recounts how calculus tantalized and thrilled its inventors, starting with its first glimmers in ancient Greece and bringing us right up to the discovery of gravitational waves. Strogatz reveals how this form of math rose to the challenges of each age: how to determine the area of a circle with only sand and a stick; how to explain why Mars goes "backwards" sometimes; how to turn the tide in the fight against AIDS.
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Not written to be read aloud
- By A Reader in Maine on 02-21-20
By: Steven Strogatz
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Muse of Fire
- World War I as Seen Through the Lives of the Soldier Poets
- By: Michael Korda
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 13 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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With Muse of Fire, Michael Korda, the bestselling author of Alone and Hero, takes a novel approach to World War I by telling its history through the lives of the soldier-poets whose verses memorialize the war's unimaginable horrors. He begins with Rupert Brooke and the halcyon days before violence engulfed his generation—destroying the self-contented world of Edwardian England—and ends with the tragic death of Wilfred Owen, killed only days before the armistice brought an end to a war that took over 25,000,000 lives.
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Very Compelling
- By Fred G on 05-20-24
By: Michael Korda
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Plato of Athens
- A Life in Philosophy
- By: Robin Waterfield
- Narrated by: Tristam Summers
- Length: 9 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Considered by many to be the most important philosopher ever, Plato was born into a well-to-do family in wartime Athens at the end of the fifth century BCE. He finally decided to go into politics, but became disillusioned, especially after the Athenians condemned his teacher, Socrates, to death. He began teaching in his twenties and later founded the Academy, the world's first higher-educational research and teaching establishment. Eventually, he returned to practical politics and spent a considerable amount of time and energy trying to create a constitution for Syracuse in Sicily.
By: Robin Waterfield
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The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic
- Reconstruction, 1860-1920
- By: Manisha Sinha
- Narrated by: Deepa Samuel
- Length: 21 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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A sweeping narrative that remakes our understanding of perhaps the most consequential period in American history, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic shows how the great contest of that age is also the great contest of our age—and serves as a necessary reminder of how young and fragile our democracy truly is.
By: Manisha Sinha
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The Murder of Professor Schlick
- The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle
- By: David Edmonds
- Narrated by: Rick Adamson
- Length: 12 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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On June 22, 1936, the philosopher Moritz Schlick was on his way to deliver a lecture at the University of Vienna when Johann Nelböck, a deranged former student of Schlick's, shot him dead on the university steps. Some Austrian newspapers defended the madman, while Nelböck himself argued in court that his onetime teacher had promoted a treacherous Jewish philosophy. David Edmonds traces the rise and fall of the Vienna Circle - an influential group of brilliant thinkers led by Schlick.
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An Epic… no less
- By Luiz H.S.de Vasconcellos on 08-28-23
By: David Edmonds
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Battle for the Bird
- Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, and the $44 Billion Fight for Twitter's Soul
- By: Kurt Wagner
- Narrated by: Shaun Taylor-Corbett
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Bloomberg journalist Kurt Wagner takes you inside Twitter’s everchanging headquarters, charting its rise from flippant 140-character posts to one of the world’s most consequential tech companies. From Jack Dorsey’s triumphant return as CEO in 2015 to the rise and fall of @RealDonaldTrump to the contentious $44 billion sale to Elon Musk, Battle for the Bird exposes the messy reality and relentless challenges that come with building a global social network.
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What really happened
- By Marsh Sutherland on 04-13-24
By: Kurt Wagner
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The Rigor of Angels
- Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality
- By: William Egginton
- Narrated by: David Glass
- Length: 10 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges was madly in love when his life was shattered by painful heartbreak. But the breakdown that followed illuminated an incontrovertible truth—that love is necessarily imbued with loss, that the one doesn’t exist without the other. German physicist Werner Heisenberg was fighting with the scientific establishment on the meaning of the quantum realm’s absurdity when he had his own epiphany—that there is no such thing as a complete, perfect description of reality.
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The most ridiculous narration
- By Anonymous User on 03-07-24
By: William Egginton
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Van Gogh
- The Life
- By: Steven Naifeh, Gregory White Smith
- Narrated by: Paul Heitsch
- Length: 44 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Working with the full cooperation of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith have accessed a wealth of previously untapped materials. While drawing liberally from the artist's famously eloquent letters, they have also delved into hundreds of unpublished family correspondences, illuminating with poignancy the wanderings of Van Gogh's troubled, restless soul. Naifeh and Smith bring a crucial understanding to the larger-than-life mythology of this great artist.
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Empathy for a True Artist
- By Sojourning Hope on 05-04-21
By: Steven Naifeh, and others
What listeners say about The Courtier and the Heretic
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Gus
- 03-15-24
A Fascinating and Surprisingly Comprehensive Work
The book description didn't help me gather an accurate impression of the subjects of discussion undertaken in this work, so I started this audiobook with a fascination toward the rationalist school and almost no expectations.
What I recieved was a fairly comprehensive historical account of the lives of Spinoza and Liebniz, both leading up to their meeting in The Hague and the years that followed, in addition to an overview and analysis of the philosophophical writings they offered, detailing how the surrounding cultures and perspectives reacted to the acquaintance with the controversial figures' ideas. I honestly didn't expect this book to cover so much material, but was pleasantly surprised to discover actual discussion of the philosophical ideas. What I found to be particularly entertaining was the evolution that Liebniz' perspective takes upon encountering Spinoza's writings, first secretly finding them rationally compelling (although feigning disgust to them when writing to certain correspondents in a series of perfidious missives) and then ultimately reviling them following their meeting in The Hague. The author clearly did his/her research, and much of the private correspondence between Liebniz, Spinoza, and many surrounding characters have been assiduously studied and articulated here in attempt to illuminate the reader with a cohesive and satisfying account of the context within which the development of the Rationalist's thinking flourished. Much to my surprise, even Liebniz' private annotations of The Ethics were discussed, among other things. Overall, I was very impressed with the scope of this book and the depth within which the material was presented.
One minor qualm I have is that Spinoza's philosophy is occasionally misrepresented, some mistakes repeatedly showing up, e.g. the confusion that Spinoza held materialist inclinations with respect to the philosophy of mind, etc. The author delivered some questionable representations of some of Liebniz' ideas too, but these are not very serious concerns given the obscurity of much of these philosophers' ideas and the apparent focus of this work on the history, though I thought it worth mentioning anyway.
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