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Rating: 
Summary: Well done
Review: Richard Mason is a pretty sympathetic expositor of Spinoza, but he likes to get his digs in when he can. (Spinoza comes in, for example, for a little gentle ribbing on the question whether anyone can achieve blessedness without relying on Scripture. Mason suggests in a parenthetical comment that Spinoza may have thought he and Jesus were the only two people who could do so.)Overall, this volume is an excellent exposition of Spinoza's thought about God and religion -- and it has some very interesting features. For one thing, there's a full chapter devoted to figuring out just what Spinoza thought of Jesus -- a much-neglected topic. For another, there's _another_ full chapter devoted to figuring out just what Spinoza meant by the eternality of the mind. I find Mason very congenial on many points. For my money he outdoes both Edwin Curley _and_ Jonathan Bennett on some topics -- especially Spinoza's views on the nature of necessity. He also beats the heck out of Yovel on Spinoza's relations to religion. And at one point he offers a gentle corrective to nineteenth-century-idealistic readings of Spinoza (especially Joachim), arguing that Spinoza did think it was possible to know things short of the Absolute. (I think, by the way, that this is both correct and entirely consonant with idealism as it should be understood; in my view the British neo-Hegelians were a bit vulnerable on this point.) Some readers may like his approach and its conclusion: that there isn't any point to digging around behind Spinoza's words looking for theological secrets; Spinoza meant just what he wrote. (Which means, among other things, that he wasn't trying either to found a new religion or to undermine any existing ones.) Straussians will disagree, of course, but frankly there seems to be little reason to apply persecution-and-the-art-of-writing standards to Spinoza's writings. A nice addition to everyone's home Spinoza library.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent discussion of Spinoza's background and metaphysics
Review: This book is an excellent source, for those interested in the influence of the Jewish/Marrano background of Spinoza, but also for those interested in his metaphysics. The discussion on the attributes was very smooth.
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