This chapter outlines the history of Russian Realism against a European backdrop. In the Russian Empire, as in Europe, there were no influential aesthetic manifestos predating the rise of Realist literature. Although the first seeds of the movement can be seen in the work of Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Lermontov, and the critic Vissarion Belinskii, this chapter considers the dominant period of Russian Realism to be the period from 1845 to the 1880s. The Natural School foregrounded the genre of the physiological sketch and produced the first Realist novels by Fedor Dostoevskii, Aleksandr Herzen, and Ivan Goncharov. The ‘High’ Realism of the 1850s−80s featured a proliferation of the novel as a genre and thematic preoccupations with the role of gentry, the peasant question, political radicalism, the ‘woman question’, and bureaucracy.

Like Spinoza, Grotius was born in the Netherlands. He lived a full life, being actively engaged in both politics and business as well as research. As a politician and statesman, Grotius held posts ranging from Pensionary of Rotterdam (starting in 1613) to Ambassador to France for Sweden (from 1634). Though it is not clear how effective his efforts were in these arenas – for instance, at one point the Swedish Chancellor Axel Oxenstierna felt obliged to travel to France to resolve issues that he thought were inadequately addressed by Grotius – he stuck with them for his whole life. In business, Grotius used his skills as a lawyer to serve various clients, including the immense Dutch East India Company (VOC). They esteemed him highly enough to offer Grotius the Governor Generalship of the VOC in Asia.

Pierre Bayle was a French Huguenot philosopher and founding editor of the journal Nouvelles de la République des Lettres. His principal work, the Dictionnaire historique et critique, was a massive encyclopedia, whose extensive article on Spinoza was of both historical and philosophical importance. Historically, Bayle’s painstaking research into the details of Spinoza’s life and works made the article an indispensable source of information concerning the Dutch philosopher. Philosophically, the article featured one of the earliest and most influential critical engagements with Spinoza’s metaphysical system, a reading that would shape the reception of Spinoza’s work throughout much of the eighteenth century. In addition, Bayle’s portrayal of Spinoza as the exemplar of the virtuous atheist enjoyed great currency among Enlightenment thinkers and, in particular, the French philosophes.

summarizes how key concepts like tianxia (All-under-Heaven) and jiaohua (assimilation) have been traced throughout to illustrate conditions leading to the formation of collective identities. This chapter offers closing thoughts on the entangled relationship between empire and ethnicity and ways to reanimate studies of ethnicity outside the standard idiom of biology.

Throughout his works, Spinoza analyzes and seeks to undermine the power of prejudice (preajudicium) to obstruct knowledge and prevent human flourishing and freedom.

The seventh and final chapter presents a new interpretation of Richard Simon’s Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (1678). Having set out the course of his early career (and especially his study of Hebrew manuscripts in the library of the Oratory), it outlines how Simon presented a novel account of the practice and purpose of Catholic biblical scholarship. Its conclusion reflects on why this was found challenging by his contemporaries, and discusses how the reception of his work differed so extensively from that of Louis Cappel’s Critica sacra.

Robert Boyle was perhaps the finest experimental natural philosopher of his age. He was active in the Republic of Letters, being one of the founding members of the Royal Society and a correspondent with scientific luminaries of his day. He was in broad strokes an adherent of what was then called the mechanical philosophy, which held that all qualities of natural things could be reduced to the properties of matter in motion. He was a reductionist about qualities, holding that “almost all sorts of qualities … may be produced … by such corporeal agents as do not appear either to work otherwise than by virtue of the motion, size, figure, and contrivance, of their own parts” (Boyle 1666, preface)

Chapter 1 focuses on the practice and purpose of biblical scholarship in the Catholic world in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth century. It traces the fortunes of three prospective polyglot editions of the Bible in Spain, the Southern Netherlands, and France to examine how the publication of authoritative Roman editions of the Septuagint (1587) and Vulgate (1592) posed new challenges for Catholic scholars and editors of the Bible.

Moses Maimonides (Moshe ben Maimon), one of the giants of medieval Jewish philosophy and a leading authority on Jewish law (halakhah), was born in Córdoba around 1138 and died near Cairo in 1204. Maimonides worked as a physician, served the Jewish community as a teacher and rabbinical judge, and became the head of the Egyptian Jewish community. Maimonides’ influence on Spinoza was considerable.

The TIE (Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione) is an early, unfinished text that first appeared in the Opera posthuma. There is strong evidence that it was mostly written before Ep6 and the KV (Mignini ) and that it was, perhaps, intended as a methodological companion to that metaphysical work. Spinoza was familiar with the methodological works of Aristotle and Bacon. Descartes, however, in some ways provided the closest model for Spinoza’s project. Like Descartes’ Discourse on Method which accompanied scientific works illustrating the method, the TIE begins with an inspiring autobiographical story about redirecting one’s life toward the pursuit of the highest good. The TIE even more closely follows the model of Descartes’s similarly titled Rules for the Direction of the Native Intellect. Like Spinoza’s TIE, that methodological work was left unfinished and unpublished in the author’s lifetime, but it is likely that Spinoza had access to it (Marion ). The project of the TIE is, as the title suggests, to emend or purify the intellect of distractions resulting from the pursuit of sensual pleasure, honor, wealth, and so on.

Spinoza conceives of love of esteem (gloria) as an important part of human motivation, which makes it important to understanding his psychology, ethical theory, and political theory. In the Ethics, Spinoza defines gloria as joy accompanied by the idea of some action of ours that we imagine others praise (E3DA30). Given that Spinoza defines love as joy combined with an idea of a cause (E3p13s, E3DA6), gloria can be glossed as the love of the praise or esteem of others. Spinoza’s definition is likely informed by his reading of Hobbes’s Of the Citizen, which explains gloria as a species of joy that arises from imagining one’s own powers. However, in Hobbes this joy can be based on a person’s own assessment of their powers, whereas Spinoza’s definition implies that this joy necessarily arises from the esteem of others. In emphasizing the importance of esteem to glory, Spinoza may be influenced by Descartes’s Passions of the Soul, which regards esteem as critical to defining and distinguishing many emotions.

In Part Five of the Ethics, Spinoza claims that there is something that “pertains to the mind’s duration without relation to the body” (E5p20s), and that “the human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body, but something of it remains that is eternal [aeternum]” (E5p23). However, there seems to be nothing personal about this eternal aspect of the mind. While it might be possible to individuate one eternal mind from another – by virtue of their respective ideas and their representational contents and through each mind’s “formal essence” as the idea in Thought of a particular body in Extension – the eternal mind is not an immortal “soul” or self that, via consciousness and memory, is the postmortem continuation of the person in this lifetime. The eternity of the mind is certainly not something that encourages thinking about death and the afterlife, much less something in which one might find comfort or that should be an object of hope or fear. While some scholars do regard Spinoza as trying to accommodate a traditional doctrine of personal immortality (e.g.

The book draws to a close by assessing how far, by the end of the seventeenth century, the ‘limits of erudition’ were on the verge of being transcended. This chapter focuses in particular on the ways in which Louis Cappel and Richard Simon attempted to alter how their contemporaries construed the relationship between Scripture, scholarship, and given confessional positions. The book concludes by presenting a new interpretation of the significance of Simon’s work.

This chapter describes the process whereby modern Russian literature came into being and entered the western European cultural mainstream in the eighteenth century. The period witnessed the creation of a modern vernacular Russian literary language and saw the development of the basic features of a modern literature with its literary and institutional infrastructure. The term ‘Classicism’ came into use in the 1820s as a retroactive label that disparaged the previous century’s literature as hopelessly rule-bound and obsolete, but this hardly corresponds to its complex, dynamic, and in fact intensely creative character. The chapter surveys the period through the lens of the modern literary language, with a focus on the creation of the so-called ‘Slaveno-Russian cultural and linguistic synthesis’ of mid-century that resolved the problem of the Baroque heritage and fundamentally shaped the literary practice of the age.

The controversies that plagued the Critica sacra described in Chapter 3 took place while it was in manuscript. Chapter 4 shows what happened when it finally found its way into print, prompting considerable debate in both Catholic and Protestant Europe. In the former, it focuses on how the work was received in Rome, tracking the lengthy investigation it was subject to at the Congregation of the Index and then the Holy Office. In the latter, it charts the wide-ranging public disputes the work elicited, paying particular attention to reconstructing the scholarly views and methods that underpinned Johann Buxtorf II and Archbishop James Ussher’s engagement with Cappel’s work.