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A review by rpmiller
The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy by Anthony Gottlieb
3.0
As an introductory text with a broad scope, this book is quite good. However, as with the preceding book in the series (The Dream of Reason: A History of Western Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance), there is insufficient depth in some of the chapters. In several cases, I feel Gottlieb has not understood the philosophers he is writing about.
As far as scope, I wanted to see if there was past thought along the lines of some of my own thinking. It appears that Spinoza and Leibniz share some of those ideas, as did Parmenides from the previous work. Oddly, Gottlieb missed the mark on all three, in my opinion, even digging a deeper hole by bringing up Parmenides several times in this book. Still, for me, it was worth reading this book to find those later philosophers without reading all of the rest.
An example: "This sounds a little like Parmenides’s famously implausible theory that everything is unreal except for 'the One.'" Little remains of Parmenides actual writings, and his contemporaries probably misunderstood him as well. My reading of those fragments leads to a different conclusion than being implausible.
Or this example: Leibniz wrote "the universe—which is “all of one piece, like an ocean”
There are some interesting quotations as well. Leibniz "time and space are purely relative. They are not entities in their own right, but consist merely in the relations between objects" or about Voltaire, Gottlieb wrote "He also profitably exploited a loophole in French lotteries that had been pointed out to him by a mathematician."
As far as scope, I wanted to see if there was past thought along the lines of some of my own thinking. It appears that Spinoza and Leibniz share some of those ideas, as did Parmenides from the previous work. Oddly, Gottlieb missed the mark on all three, in my opinion, even digging a deeper hole by bringing up Parmenides several times in this book. Still, for me, it was worth reading this book to find those later philosophers without reading all of the rest.
An example: "This sounds a little like Parmenides’s famously implausible theory that everything is unreal except for 'the One.'" Little remains of Parmenides actual writings, and his contemporaries probably misunderstood him as well. My reading of those fragments leads to a different conclusion than being implausible.
Or this example: Leibniz wrote "the universe—which is “all of one piece, like an ocean”
There are some interesting quotations as well. Leibniz "time and space are purely relative. They are not entities in their own right, but consist merely in the relations between objects" or about Voltaire, Gottlieb wrote "He also profitably exploited a loophole in French lotteries that had been pointed out to him by a mathematician."