Word: spinoza
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...last year--The Open Universe attacks Einstein's theory of determinism, which holds that with a sophisticated enough scientific approach, man can explain and predict all occurences. But the argument only rarely appears dated. Popper proves that classical theory can never fulfill the objectives of the traditional philosophers--from Spinoza, Hobbes and Hume to Kant, Schopenhauer, and J.S. Mill--because it lends itself, through inaccuracy, to randomness and unpredictability. In this way, he buttresses quantum theory, which incorporates randomness as a principle. Einstein had often attacked this with his famous "God does not play dice with the Universe...
...Spinoza's fault. In 1908 William James Durant, the Massachusetts-born son of unschooled French-Canadian immigrants, was well on his way to fulfilling his mother's dream that he become a priest. Then he came upon a copy of Spinoza's Ethics in a seminary library. So convincing did he find the 17th century Dutch pantheist that he quickly abandoned the church, deciding instead, as he put it, to pursue a "more intellectually honest life." What he found was another calling. For 48 years, eleven volumes and nearly 10,000 pages, Will Durant labored with monastic...
...address to the Knesset, Carter displayed a new appreciation for graceful language and thought, deciding in those critical circumstances to go beyond himself ("Doubts are the stuff of great decisions, but so are dreams"). Men like Spinoza, whom he had rarely allowed entry into his down-home rhetoric, showed up ("Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice...
...rely on the old Newtonian absolutes, as an attack on religion. Boston's Cardinal O'Connell charged that relativity was "cloaked in the ghastly apparition of atheism." For a rabbi who asked him frankly if he believed in God, Einstein recalled a famous Jewish apostate: "I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of all that exists, not in the God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings...
...Miami Beach senior citizen. Now he lives quietly, Lansky told a visitor from the Miami News, enjoying a complete absence of memory ("There is no such thing as organized crime"). What does he do with his spare time? Well, he reads: "Lately, philosophy-just now I'm reading Spinoza." One might wonder what the 17th century Dutch-Jewish mathematical rationalist would have had to say to a retired racketeer. Perhaps this, from Spinoza's Ethics: "He who cannot govern his desires, and keep them in check with the fear of the laws ... cannot enjoy with contentment the knowledge...