denies that God is a person or acts for purposes; that anything is good or evil from the divine perspective; or that there is a personal immortality involving memory. In addition to his influence on the history of biblical criticism and on literature (including not only Novalis but such writers as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Heine, Shelley, George Eliot, George Sand, Somerset Maugham, Jorge Luis Borges, and Bernard Malamud), Spinoza has affected the philosophical outlooks of such diverse twentieth-century thinkers as Freud and Einstein. Contemporary physicists have seen in his monistic metaphysics an anticipation of twentieth-century field metaphysics. More generally, he is a leading intellectual forebear of twentieth-century determinism and naturalism, and of the mind–body identity theory. See also DESCARTES, LEIBNIZ , RATIONAL- IS. D.Garr. Spir, Afrikan (1837–90), German philosopher. He served in the Crimean War as a Russian officer. A non-academic, he published books in German and French. His major works are Forschung nach der Gewissheit in der Erkenntnis der Wirklichkeit (Inquiry concerning Certainty in the Knowledge of Actuality, 1869) and the two-volume Denken und Wirklichkeit: Versuch einer Erneuerung der kritischen Philosophie (Thought and Actuality: Attempt at a Revival of Critical Philosophy, 1873).
Thought and Actuality presents a metaphysics based on the radical separation of the apparent world and an absolute reality. All we can know about the ‘unconditioned’ is that it must conform with the principle of identity. While retaining the unknowable thing-in-itself of Kant, Spir argued for the empirical reality of time, which is given to us in immediate experience and depends on our experience of a succession of differential states. The aim of philosophy is to reach fundamental and immediate certainties. Of the works included in his Gesammelte Schriften (1883– 84), only a relatively minor study, Right and Wrong, was translated into English (in 1954). There are a number of references to Spir in the writings of Nietzsche, which indicate that some of Nietzsche’s central notions were influenced, both positively and negatively, by Spir’s analyses of becoming and temporality, as well as by his concept of the separation of the world of appearance and the ‘true world.’ G.J.S.