Reception
Immediately after it was published, the book was denounced as being atheistic. This was the result of its conception of God as having no anthropomorphic characteristics such as sight, hearing, thought, will, emotion, purpose, mercy, etc.
The book subsequently has had a lasting influence on the history of philosophy, seen most clearly in Leibniz, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Deleuze and Davidson.
Read more about this topic: Ethics (book)
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)