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...No other thinker was considered to have systematized ‘atheism’ so as to turn it into a working philosophy to the same extent or as effectively as Spinoza. If there were, and had long been, many, philosophical ‘atheists’ publicly condemned as such, stretching back, via Vanini, to Epicurus and Lucretius, “je crois qu’il est le premier,” writes Bayle in his Dictionnaire, “qui ait réduit en système l’athéisme, et qui en ait fait un corps de doctrine lié et tissu selon les manières des geomètres…”, a pronouncement that itself became immensely influential through the rest of the Enlightenment. As the Cambridge don, Brampton Gurdon , son of a Suffolk gentleman and member of Parliament, expressed this point , in 1723, “Spinoza is the only person among the modern Atheists, that has pretended to give us a regular scheme of Atheism, and therefore I cannot act unfairly in making him the representative of their party, and in proving the weakness and absurdities of the atheistick scheme, by shewing the faults of his.” Criticism of the existing order of things using ‘atheistic’ ideas as a tool to demolish accepted thinking long remained the exclusive speciality of a forbidden ‘underground’ philosophy associated with Spinoza’s name rather than any other. (en) |
