Heretics! The Wondrous (and dangerous) beginnings of modern philosophy by Steven Nadler and Ben Nadler

It's a wonderful, beautiful, sunny, colored, funny book Heretics! The Wondrous (and dangerous) beginnings of modern philosophy by Steven Nadler and Ben Nadler. The cover, with spectacular, warm colors, reminds us at old--times

Princeton University Press launched this graphic novel, a real funny full immersion into the mind of the principal thinkers of the 1600.

These philosophers didn't change just philosophy but the structure of the modern thought thanks to their innovative ideas. At first we meet Giordano Bruno burned, poor chap, because of his too much modern ideas.

At the same time 1600 is a period of ferment.
Galileo Galilei with its theories about Earth seen as a Planet in movement is condemned by the Church: he is a heretic.  Just these recent years the Catholic Church admitted its error, giving back him peace, credits and respect.

Descartes thought that only men had souls, excluding animals and all the other creatures from his theory. His theories, like also the ones of the various thinkers of 1600 and 1700 spaced from philosophy to physics because there is to saying this: we live in the XXI century in an Age of specializations, where people in general are specialized in a certain field of knowledge, and that's it.

In the past starting from Humanism passing through Renaissance and also 1600 thinkers were able to create beautiful and original theories with different subjects and topics, thanks to the immensity of their knowledge, extended in arts, philosophy, history, physics, literature, astronomy, medicine, science, occult.
Descartes studied science and perception and objects. I found hilarious this.
Descartes says: "How can I know that I can know if I don't know what it is to know?" A friend of him looking at him and at a bottle of wine close to him thinks that maybe it is better to stop to drink too much for avoiding other nonsense :-)
Movements of bodies other topics developed by Descartes.
Pascal a much more pessimistic thinker like also Thomas Hobbes.
Hobbes thinks that for governing people it's better just a person.
separating the State from the Church and thinking that the Church should stay out from the decisions taken by the State.

Spinoza at the same time thinks that nature or God are synonyms. There is no bad or good in nature to the Jewish philosopher. Goodness or badness happens and that's it. According to Spinoza we should try to understand what it drives us: our passions or our rationality?
Leibnitz was a passionate mathematician but gave also fundamental answers about the human being. Leibnitz believed in God as most of these thinkers. The graphic novels ends with the arrival in 1703 of Isaac Newton with his three fundamental laws of motion and law of gravitation and with Voltaire.

In common these philosophers shared a passion: the one of trying to discover the essence of the world in its complexity and its reality.
This choice meant   troubles and problems. Most of them considered heretics, their thoughts too innovative for being appreciates by the most conservative and skeptical part of their world, they are  the most modern fighters of the free thought. Some of them lost their life because of their ideas, someone else  in jail, but, all of them fought for giving a new definition of the world where they lived in.

Passionate, this sunny graphic narrative novel will be surely appreciate by everyone! What I loved the most the immediate full-immersion in a multi-dimensional reality involving God, physics, philosophy, society, laws, order, government in just 180 or so pages. Stunning!

I thank Princeton University Press for the physical copy of this amazing graphic novel!



Anna Maria Polidori