Like "Wittgenstein's Poker" this book turns a single event in the lives of two important philosophers into a full-length book. Where one book concerned a possible fight, here it's a meeting which is believed by Stewart to have caused a painful conversion-epiphany in Leibniz, the conservative courtier. Both works are lively, good reads, but that's where the similarity ends. While "Wittgenstein's Poker," at least in the main, gets analytical philosophy, logical positivism, and ordinary language philosophy right, Stewart makes quite a mess of Leibniz. In fact, while he has an advanced degree in philosophy, he seems to have a very limited understanding of either of his subject's main works. And, unfortunately, what he does seem to get right, he feels the need to explain by the main thesis of his book--that Leibniz was a closet Spinozist for most of his life and only pretended to disagree with him to protect his status.

I can't go into the details of these errors in a brief review of this type, but Leibniz's understanding of necessity was very different from Spinoza's and Stewart's limited understanding of modal logic has produced a hash, rather than anything coherent out of Leibniz's "best of all possible worlds" claim (which, while it may be difficult to believe, can at least be made coherent if one understands the notion of possible worlds in the manner of that philosopher). Stewart's botching of Leibniz is clear and will be fairly obvious to students of that philosopher's works, but his take on Spinoza (on whom I wrote my own Ph.D. thesis) is hazier and, as a result, arguably not so awful. I do think, though, that Spinoza's notions of "salvation" and intuitive knowledge can only be made to jibe with this book after considerable analysis and explication--very little of which can be found here.

At any rate, I learned a good deal about the life, times and psychological make-up of these men, for which I'm grateful to the author.

This book filled a gap in my education. I knew Spinoza from an introductory Philosophy class. Leibniz I knew from multiple mathematics classes--mostly as a 'pretender' to the throne of the calculus. But neither were brought together in a single place for me to appreciate before this.

The fleshing out of each main character reinforced what I knew of each and about each philosophy. I knew Spinoza well, but discovering Stewart's personal conflicts with Leibniz whetted my curiosity about both Leibniz and Stewart. Even though Stewart tried to stay out of this book, I became interested in his personal philosophy, and will be looking for future works. But still, the main focus of this book is where it should be; on the main characters.

I read, and will continue to read, this book differently from most. I will keep this book at my bedside for a few months, reading it occasionally, perhaps letting each reading episode lead to other books and other thoughts. There is more here than I can assimilate with just a single reading.