Lest you think...

...I spend all my time in the kitchen with young children - I read - a lot. Coming from a line of women who will forget to feed their children when they are reading, it is a good thing the little ones here go home at night, otherwise they might go hungry.

In my late teens I encountered Spinoza in Philosophy 101 and my Jewish history course - I didn't remember much about him except that he was expelled from the Amsterdam Jewish community for heresy and supported himself as a lens maker. But a review of this book interested me, because it focuses on the social context that gave rise to his thinking, and the influence of his ideas on the world.

As an angry young woman in my twenties I would have rejected him as another of those old guys whose thinking was part of the patriarchy I was rebelling against. It seemed his answers had nothing to offer me. Several decades later I find the questions at least as interesting as the answers; how do we understand identity, and the suffering that comes with human life? I am curious about the similarity of his insights to Buddhist thought, though his methodology is different, and have added Antonio Damasio's "Looking for Spinoza" and Isaac Bashevis Singer's "The Spinoza of Market Street" to my reading list.

I still have a long way to go in my understanding of Spinoza, but now when the little children play their game of "snatch and shriek" (one snatches a toy from another, who then shrieks - in case you were wondering), or spill their milk, so they can smear it over the table and watch it spill over the edge - I wonder "how would Spinoza deal with this"?