Tom McCarthy
speaker
238 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 2 Aug
Tom McCarthy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Well, this claim I'm making, which, by the way, to any serious scholar of George Eliot, will be completely uncontroversial.
Exactly.
I mean, yeah, she translated Feuerbach, she translated Strauss, but it really rests on two major central figures, the first of whom is Spinoza, right?
Benedictus Spinoza, Baruch Spinoza.
He publishes his Ethics in 1677.
Eliot translated it from 1854 to 56.
It wasn't actually published until the 20th century, but she spent two years translating it.
And in The Ethics, Spinoza kind of presents the universe as a pervasive substance, linking everything together.
It's just one big tapestry.
Everything only exists and operates in relation to everything else.
There's nothing behind it.
There's nothing in front of it.
There is no God else.
I mean, she calls it, he calls it God, but in effect, it's an atheistic universe.
vision, because there is nothing beyond the material fabric.
Now, Eliot is, like I said, she spent two years translating it, and it absolutely permeates Middlemarch.
She describes her characters moving with kindred natures in the same embroiled medium.
It's straight out of Spinoza, the image.
And I think her favorite kind of way of framing this kind of vision is through the textile conceit of the web, which has long been one of Eliot's favorites.
So Silas Marner is obviously is about a weaver and the whole, the threads of life, the pattern of the cloth, the structure of events, the intervals and repetitions in that book are all understood in terms of
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