5 Lessons from Spinoza

By: Oswald Sobrino

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Baruch de Spinoza (also known as Benedict or Bento de Spinoza;1632-1677) is a titan of philosophy who drew on his Sephardic Jewish background and on his education in the classics and in philosophy at the hands of an ex-Jesuit. He grew up speaking Portuguese in Amsterdam but was educated in Spanish and Hebrew. A quiet, calm man, Spinoza nevertheless angered the theological authorities of his Sephardic community of Portuguese and Spanish Jews. The result was a harsh decree of excommunication. Many consider his greatest work to be his Ethics (1677), published posthumously. In this work, he provides a roadmap for seeking happiness, genuine freedom, and virtue in life. My book discusses five lessons from Spinoza on these topics: God and nature (Ch. 1); determinism and free will (Ch. 2); the passions (Ch. 3); the power of the passions (Ch. 4); and human freedom (Ch. 5).

Ok summary but lacks a lot of explaining and discussion

Virtual narration is very annoying, keep reading everything even notes which makes the listening very hard to focus on, needs improvements

It was misleading

I didn't care for this at all. There was so much effort put into pointing at the reference material, the premise was lost

Drive me nuts

The AI generated narrator read all the footnotes and citations. I couldn’t even follow the key concepts. It was so distracting to have the voice literally read “ibid, citation, parentheses” etc..