Stewart, Matthew 1963-

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Stewart, Matthew 1963-

PERSONAL:

Born 1963. Education: Princeton University, B.A.; Oxford University, Ph.D.

ADDRESSES:

Home—New York, NY.

CAREER:

Writer, philosopher, and management consultant. Mitchell Madison Group (management consulting firm), New York, NY, founding partner.

WRITINGS:

The Truth about Everything: An Irreverent History of Philosophy, Prometheus Books (Amherst, NY), 1997.

Monturiol's Dream: The Extraordinary Story of the Submarine Inventor Who Wanted to Save the World, Pantheon Books (New York, NY), 2004.

The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World, Norton (New York, NY), 2006.

SIDELIGHTS:

Matthew Stewart was educated in philosophy and spent much of his youth in Barcelona, Spain, factors that have heavily influenced his writings, including The Truth about Everything: An Irreverent History of Philosophy and Monturiol's Dream: The Extraordinary Story of the Submarine Inventor Who Wanted to Save the World.

In The Truth about Everything, Stewart recounts the history of Western philosophy and strives to establish an unconventional definition of philosophy that rejects Western influences. Paul Rosenberg, writing in the Philadelphia City Paper Online, remarked that Stewart "makes a lot of sense getting down to brass tacks: there's plenty of hot air in philosophy and he's got the eye for it…. Anyone thinking of a major in philosophy would do well to read this first." A reviewer for Publishers Weekly called The Truth about Everything "a deliciously iconoclastic and often funny historical survey of Western philosophy."

Monturiol's Dream traces the life of nineteenth-century inventor Narcis Monturiol. Monturiol was a political revolutionary who studied law but, as a self-trained engineer, developed what Stewart asserts was the first true submarine, the Ictineo. In his book Stewart attempts to bring the life of this technological and political visionary—mostly unknown outside of his native Barcelona—to the forefront. Considering the book "highly recommended," Choice critic M.W. Carr described the story as "more than a tale of a successful inventor … it also details the frustration and challenges Monturiol had with financing, polities, and society's view of new ideas and inventions. This book should be read for its engineering features and for its insight into social structures." Tim Rauschenberger wrote in a review for Christian Science Monitor that "Stewart has done a great service in bringing Monturiol to the surface…. His choice application of wit is sometimes necessary to prevent the routine tragedies of a tumultuous time from dragging down the narrative. And the book contains scores of interesting illustrations that help us keep Monturiol's acquaintances, benefactors, and adversaries straight." In a review for American Scientist, Cindy Lee Van Dover called Monturiol's Dream "a roller-coaster ride through the inventor's trials, triumphs, frustrations, despair, capitulation and penury….We are fortunate to have Stewart's remarkable book to help preserve the memory of the Ictineo and of its inventor." James A. Buczynski of Library Journal commented that "Stewart vividly and suspensefully narrates the evolution of Monturiol's revolutionary submarines."

In The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World, Stewart tells the story of two of the greatest thinkers of the late seventeenth century—men whose systems of thought garnered international reputations for their authors, and who helped establish the principles that ruled the Enlightenment of the following century. Baruch de Spinoza was a Dutch Jew from the Portuguese community in Amsterdam, a member of a community-in-exile that had fled from persecution to the relative safety of the Netherlands. "A precocious student of the Jewish school at Amsterdam, fluent in Hebrew and thoroughly versed in the Bible," wrote Donna Martin in a review for the National Catholic Reporter, "he was excommunicated from the Jewish community at age 24 for his heretical beliefs about the nature of God, the origins of the Bible and his rejection of personal immortality. Self-assured, even arrogant in his beliefs, he moved to The Hague, where, cloaked in anonymity, he published his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus." That work, Martin continued, helped establish the basic philosophic principles that govern secular states in the modern era.

In 1676, Spinoza received a visit from another young philosopher, Gottfried Leibniz. Leibniz's origins and career were about as unlike Spinoza's as possible. According to a critic writing for the Economist, "Leibniz was born into the Christian establishment as the son of a philosophy professor in Leipzig. Both had an early experience of rejection: Leibniz had his doctorate turned down, while the young Spinoza's fate was even harsher." Leibniz (who would later become famous as one of the cofounders of calculus) at first embraced Spinoza's theological views (characterized by their contemporaries as atheistic), but later in his career he turned against them, searching instead for a way to reconcile Protestant and Catholic theology. Spinoza's philosophy, declared a Kirkus Reviews contributor, helped establish "the basis of classical liberalism and much of our modern scientific outlook. Leibniz, in contrast, formed the basis for the conservative religious community's response to modernism." "Stewart concludes that much of Leibniz's metaphysics is cloaked spinozism," Christopher Martin stated in Shofar; "Spinoza's and Leibniz's metaphysics are different descriptions of the same city, the Let's Go and Lonely Planet's guide to Divine." The Courtier and the Heretic, said a Literary Review contributor, is "the best current untechnical introduction to the lives and philosophies of the two men. [Stewart] does it in very agreeable prose, and what he says rests on a sound bottom of historical and philosophical scholarship, so lightly worn that one is not conscious of the skill that has gone into making the epoch and its seminal ideas accessible. The result is a thoroughly good book, hard to put down for anyone interested in the great story of the Western intellectual tradition." "Stewart's wit and profluent prose," concluded a Publishers Weekly writer, "make this book a fascinating read."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Scientist, September-October, 2004, Cindy Lee Van Dover, review of Monturiol's Dream: The Extraordinary Story of the Submarine Inventor Who Wanted to Save the World, pp. 478-479.

Biography, spring, 2006, review of The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World.

Booklist, June 1, 2004, Gilbert Taylor, review of Monturiol's Dream, p. 1696; January 1, 2006, Bryce Christensen, review of The Courtier and the Heretic, p. 28.

Choice, November, 2004, M.W. Carr, review of Monturiol's Dream, p. 505.

Christian Science Monitor, August 3, 2004, Tim Rauschenberger, review of Monturiol's Dream, p. 17.

Contemporary Review, December, 2003, review of Monturiol's Dream, p. 382.

Discover, November, 2004, Maia Weinstock, review of Monturiol's Dream, p. 88.

Economist, January 7, 2006, "Chicken Soup for the Brain; God and Philosophy," p. 74.

Geographical, September, 2003, Mick Herron, review of Monturiol's Dream, p. 53.

Guardian (London, England), April 15, 2006, Diarmaid MacCulloch, "Of Miracles and Monads."

Journal of Ecclesiastical History, April, 2007, Victor Nuovo, review of The Courtier and the Heretic, p. 356.

Kirkus Reviews, November 15, 2005, review of The Courtier and the Heretic, p. 1225.

Library Journal, July, 2004, James A. Buczynski, review of Monturiol's Dream, p. 114; October 1, 2005, Francisca Goldsmith, review of The Courtier and the Heretic, p. 79.

National Catholic Reporter, July 14, 2006, "A Chance and Fateful Meeting: Author Examines an Epochal Encounter between Two Philosophers," p. 16.

New York Sun, December 28, 2005, "The Philosophy of Philosophy."

New York Times, February 26, 2006, Liesl Schillinger, review of The Courtier and the Heretic.

Publishers Weekly, January 13, 1997, review of The Truth about Everything: An Irreverent History of Philosophy, p. 64; May 17, 2004, review of Monturiol's Dream, p. 46; August 15, 2005, review of The Courtier and the Heretic, p. 43.

Reference & Research Book News, February, 2006, review of The Courtier and the Heretic.

Science News, September 4, 2004, review of Monturiol's Dream, p. 159.

Utopian Studies, summer, 2006, Miguel A. Ramiro Aviles, review of Monturiol's Dream.