The Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. publishes a book called The Great Conversation, and in that book is an author-to-author index cataloging “how the authors use, expand on, or refute the ideas of their predecessors.” According to these folks, Spinoza’s predecessors were the Bible and Descarte.
Spinoza was born in 1632. His parents had left Portugal to benefit from the religious tolerance of the Dutch. The Jewish community regarded his father highly, but that same community excommunicated Spinoza by the time he was twenty-four for “abominable heresies which he practice[d] and t[aught].” In 1670 Spinoza wrote the Theological-Political Treatise to assert “the liberty of philosophizing and of saying what we thing.” Great Books of the Western World, volume 28, Biographical Note Benedict (Baruch) de Spinoza.
So, it appears Spinoza is definitely one for us!
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3 comments:
Jim: If I'm going to stay up, which it appears I am, I really need to do some more work for the man, rather than this work for the Man.
But before I return to my bread and butter thinking, I read through Spinoza's propositions in part I of Ethics. Basically, he is asserting the ontological proof for the existance of god. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del's_ontological_proof
Here's my question, given that this proof obviously falls short of defining the loving, conscious God, why do you suppose smart guys like Spinoza, Descartes, Anselm, etc. go to the trouble? What do you think they are doing?
Jim: BTW, I think reading guys like Spinoza is an important exercise. Because, something I am not sure of is the ability of logical reasoning to change the behavior of individuals. A legal thinker and federal judge named Posner has written about this a lot. He believes that only "moral entrepreneurs" are capable of changing personal behavior and for that reason viciously derides moral philosophers. See Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory, Richard Posner.
So, can Spinoza impact the world with his thinking, or do we really need an MLK to do that?
Matt: These are important questions. I think Spinoza absolutely affected the world's thinking. I posed him exactly because he gave a secular framework on which to hang high morals.
In terms of why to find a proof for God when God is a naturalist construct? Because re-defining God, for Spinoza, was a way for him to connect with the roots of the culture which eventually excommunicated him. It was an incredibly emotional thing for him, or at least we should surmize it as such. The language used in the decree of his banishment went beyond the normal language of Jewish excommunication -- they really laid him out. He was to never be spoken to *OR OF* again. I'll look up an author who I watched on C-SPAN's Book TV a few months ago. She went through his influences pretty heavily and it was really interesting.
The other thing is I think guys like Spinoza and Descartes were poking around a space that Eastern philosophy has more fully developed. I think they sort of thought their way on their own to the Naturalistic Holism kinds of thoughts. I would imagine at the time of their writings, this was not even vaguely familiar to their audiences or themselves, which makes it a more exciting leap of logic than it may seem to us, which in turn probably helped keep their interest in pursuing it in a more lengthy essay.
Just some half-formed thoughts.
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