Politics & Social Issues - Fiction, Jewish Fiction & Literature, Character Types - Fiction, Historical Fiction

The Spinoza Problem

Name: The Spinoza Problem
Author: Irvin D. Yalom
ISBN: 9780465061853

by Irvin D. Yalom

Available on Bookshop Write a review

Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.

Overview

In The Spinoza Problem, Irvin Yalom spins fact and fiction into an unforgettable psycho-philosophical novel. A psychiatrist with a deep interest in philosophical issues, Yalom jointly tells the story of the seventeenth-century thinker Baruch Spinoza, his philosophy and subsequent excommunication from the Jewish community, and his apparent influence on the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, whose einsatzgruppe was dispatched during the Second World War to investigate a mysterious “Spinoza Problem.” Seamlessly alternating between Golden Age Amsterdam and Nazi Germany, Yalom investigates the inner lives of these two enigmatic men in a tale of influence and anxiety, the origins of good and evil, and the philosophy of freedom and the tyranny of terror.

About the Author, Irvin D. Yalom

Irvin D. Yalom, M.D., is an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Stanford University and a psychiatrist in private practice in San Francisco and Palo Alto. He is the author of many books, including Love’s Executioner, Theory and Practice in Group Psychotherapy, and When Nietzsche Wept. He lives with his wife in Palo Alto, California.

Reviews

There are no reviews yet. Log in to write one.

Editorials

Ron Charles

…as an accessible introduction to Spinoza's complex philosophy, Yalom's method has much to recommend it. Like a good teacher, he presents only a few ideas at a time and moves carefully from one to the next with frequent recapitulation…The conversations he creates give a lovely sense of the philosopher's character and provide a lucid explanation of the man's major ideas about nature, free will and reason. It's enlightening to see the lines of modern secularism and scientific rationalism laid down almost 400 years ago.
—The Washington Post