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| | Last years and posthumous influence. (from Benedict de Spinoza) -- Britannica Concise Encyclopedia - The online ... |
 | | During the post-Ethica period, he was visited by several important people, among them Ehrenfried Walter von Tschirnhaus (in 1675), a scientist and philosopher, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (in 1676), like Spinoza, one of the foremost Rationalists of the time. |
 | | The tone had been set by Pierre Bayle, a Skeptical philosopher and encyclopaedist, in whose Dictionnaire historique et critique Spinozism was described as the most monstrous hypothesis imaginable, the most absurd; and even David Hume, a Scottish Skeptic and historian, felt obliged to speak of the hideous hypothesis of Spinoza. |
 | | Spinoza was rendered intellectually respectable by the efforts of literary critics, especially of the Germans G.E. Lessing and J.W. von Goethe and the English poet S.T. Coleridge, who admired the man and found austere excitement in his works, in which they saw an intensely religious attitude entirely divorced from dogma. |
| www.britannica.com /ebc/article-6839 (475 words) |
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