About this latest of Prof. Michael Della Rocca's (Yale) works on Spinoza:
Beginning with an overview of Spinoza's life, Della Rocca carefully unpacks and explains Spinoza's philosophy: his metaphysics of substance and argument at the center of his whole system that God is the sole independent substance; Spinoza's account of the human mind and its relation to the body; his theory that human beings tend towards self-preservation and the role of the emotions; his most famous work, the Ethics, including the problem of free will; and his writings on the state, religion and scripture. Della Rocca concludes with a chapter on Spinoza's legacy and how modern philosophers, Hume, Hegel, and Nietzsche, responded to Spinoza's challenge.
