CHAPTER The Excommunication of Baruch Spinoza The Decree of Anathema A man excommunicate is a man alone. He is severed from his past, his parents, teachers , ...

This absorbing intellectual history vividly recreates the unique social, political, and philosophical milieu in which the extraordinary promise of Einstein and scientific contemporaries took root and flourished into greatness. Feuer shows us that no scientific breakthrough really happens by chance; it takes a certain intellectual climate, a decisive tension within the very fabric of society, to spur one man's potential genius into world-shaking achievement. Feuer portrays such men of high imaginative powers as Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, de Broglie, influenced by and (...) influencing the social worlds in which they lived. (shrink)

In The Scientific Intellectual, Lewis S. Feuer traces the evolution of this new human type, seeking to define what ethic inspired him and the underlying emotions that created him. Under the influence of Max Weber the rise of the scientific spirit has been viewed by sociologists as an offspring of the Protestant revolution, with its asceticism and sense of guilt acting as causative agents in the rise of capitalism and the growth of the scientific movement. Feuer takes strong issue with (...) this view, pointing out how it is at odds with what we know of the psychological conditions of modern societies making for human curiosity and its expression in the observation of and experiment with nature. (shrink)

Lewis S. Feuer shows that the gestation of the hypotheses of original-minded scientists, such as Darwin, Einstein, or Bohr, is in large part a subconscious process. Scientists try to project upon the world structural laws that, beside fitting the given physical realities, will also realize their own emotional longings among alternative worldviews. Repeatedly, too, in examining the standpoints of philosophical figures ranging from Spinoza, Descartes, Kant, and Mill to contemporary figures such as Einstein, Lovejoy, and Hook, Feuer illumines how sociological (...) antipathies project themselves into scientific divergences. Feuer delves into the bearing of emotive beliefs such as pacifism, socialism, anti-Semitism, upon the formation of concurrent worldviews, often fixations of scientific belief, held with the same passion in science as in religion. (shrink)

Two articles by Lewis Feuer caught my attention in the '40s when 1 was wondering, asa student physicist, about the relations of physics to philosophy and to the world in turmoil. One was his essay on 'The Development of Logical Empiricism' (1941), and the other his critical review of Philipp Frank's biography of Einstein, 'Philosophy and the Theory of Relativity' (1947). How extraordinary it was to find so intelligent, independent, critical, and humane a mind; and furthermore he went further, as (...) I soon realized when I looked for his name on other publications. I recall arguing with myself over his exploration of 'Indeterminacy and Economic Development' (1948), and even more when I read his 'Dialectical Materialism and Soviet Science' (1949). More papers, and then the fascinating, sometimes irritating, always insightful, books. His monograph on Psychoanalysis and Ethics 1955, the beautiful sociological and humanist study of Spinoza and the Rise of Liberalism (1958), his essays on 'The Social Roots of Einstein's Theory of Relativity' (1971) together with the book on Einstein and the Genera tions of Science (1974), the splendid reader from the works of Marx and Engels, Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy (1959) which was a major text of the '60s, the stimulating essays on the social formation which seems to have been required for a modern scientific movement to develop, set forth most convincingly in The Scientific Intellectual (1963). (shrink)

Mystic and Scientist: the Incompatible Components of Spinoza's Meta physics -- The Ethics of the Free Man as a Critique of the Calvinist Ethics -- The Mystic Rejection of Libertine Hedonism -- The Therapy of Self-understanding: Precursor to Freud -- Intellectual Love of God and Intellectual Hatred -- The Eternity of the Human Mind: Spinoza's Leap Beyond the Geometrical Method -- Ultimate Uncertainty: the Failure of the Geometrical Method -- Spinoza as a Left Cartesian The Infinity of God: a Masochist (...) Projection -- The Infinity of God: the Discovery of the Plurality of Attributes -- The Final Disunity of Spinoza's Thought: Linguistic Nonsense or Linguistic Transfiguration? -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Index. (shrink)