Singer, Edgar A. (Edgar Arthur)
Modern thinkers and present problems by Edgar A. Singer is a collection of philosophical essays written in the early 20th century. Framed as “an approach to modern philosophy through its history,” it examines major figures and ideas—from Bruno and Spinoza to pragmatism and progress—treating each as a “moment” in a reflective life where science, faith, freedom, and value collide.The opening of the book sets Singer’s aim: these historically grounded papers are meant to awaken readers to problems that recur in any thoughtful life. He begins with Giordano Bruno, using trial records and biography to reveal the audacity and cost of Bruno’s great idea: stars are suns in an infinite universe, a vision that shattered the medieval cosmos, strained Christian theology, and pushed Bruno toward a pantheistic reading of nature before his execution. The next section turns to Spinoza, contrasting his serene rigor with Bruno’s turbulence: adopting and sharpening Cartesian rationalism, Spinoza rejects providential ends and human free will, recasts good and evil as matters of understanding, and locates human freedom in knowing necessity—the “intellectual love of God.” A third piece illustrates Spinoza’s determinism through Paul Bourget’s novel Le Disciple, in which a student’s cold experiment in seduction ends in tragedy and a plea to his determinist mentor, raising the live tension between scientific necessity and moral responsibility that the author then prepares to examine through the “mechan…
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