-
Spinoza, Adam Bede, Knowledge, and Sympathy: A Reply to Atkins
- Philosophy and Literature
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 36, Number 2, October 2012
- pp. 424-440
- 10.1353/phl.2012.0034
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
This paper joins the conversation on the relationship between Spinoza and George Eliot. After critically examining Atkins’s claim that the novels of George Eliot, as exemplified by Adam Bede, are a presentation of Spinoza’s philosophy stripped of the geometrical method, the paper explores Eliot’s philosophical engagement with Spinoza’s views on sympathy and the imagination. Thus, Eliot is read as a philosopher engaging with the arguments of Spinoza, rather than as someone representing his views in novel form.