Reviews for Devoted People: Belief and Religion in Early Modern Ireland - Raymond Gillespie - Hardcover

The average rating for Devoted People: Belief and Religion in Early Modern Ireland - Raymond Gillespie - Hardcover based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-02-10 00:00:00 Ray Rain I finished this book on the day that the long-awaited and much-redacted Mueller Report was finally released to the American public and world media--of all days! There does seem to be some justice (I dare not call it poetic since I love poetry) in that coincidence, given Strauss' comments in the appendix on Carl Schmitt's Der Begriff Des Politischen on the impetus of modern liberalism to convert politics into another species of entertainment. Strauss contrasts Spinoza's thought with the likes of Calvin, Maimonides, Epicurus, and others, but the thinker whose shadow looms largest over Spinoza's work is that of Hobbes. Sometimes Strauss' chains of reasonings are painfully hard to follow, but in the end he seems to cede the laurel to Spinoza on the grounds that he understood in a way that Hobbes did not that for many human beings the yearning to live free is greater than the will to live simpliciter (somewhat reminiscent of Nietzsche's dictum "man would rather will nothingness than not will"). Throughout the book though there is the suspicion voiced by Strauss that Spinoza may after all not really understand the impetus to faith and orthodoxy espoused by Maimonides, though the ground of that suspicion seems only to be revealed in the little essay on Schmitt, a ground that dare not speak its own name in the case of the orthodox, and that is the belief that a humanity rendered so blissfully pacific and harmless as the politics of a Spinoza would have it would be a humanity whose destruction one might long for as a release and cure for boredom. In the end I thus found Nietzsche's shadow, though he is only named once or twice, to be even more of a looming presence than that of Hobbes.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-11-27 00:00:00 Ons Nava I think both Cohen and Strauss didn't take Spinoza seriously/literally enough, as old Strauss admitted in the preface. The real addressee of both Cohen and Strauss, however, is Moses Mendelssohn.