donderdag 13 juli 2017

Timothy L. S. Sprigge (1932 – 2007) wel gezien als "Spinoza reincarnated"…


… volgens het obituary van Jane O'Grady in The Guardian van 4 september 2007 [cf.]. Ik had al eerder aandacht voor Sprigge, n.l. in blogs die ik had over George Santayana,  voornamelijk aan de hand van teksten van Sprigge (zie onder). Maar nu een blog apart over hem.
Sprigge verzette tegen elk materialisme en fysicalisme en zag het mentale als onderliggende essentie van het universum. Kortom hij was een idealist, die vond: “the underlying essence of the universe is mental. [..] hoped to dissolve the scientific problem of how life can come out of non-life, self-reflective consciousness from organic matter, by making the whole universe conscious from the start. (Aldus nog steeds Jane O'Grady in The Guardian.). Zie over zijn excentriciteit The Telegraph 18 Sep 2007.

Timothy Lauro Squire Sprigge was a British idealist philosopher who spent the latter portion of his career at the University of Edinburgh, where he was Professor of Logic and Metaphysics, and latterly an Emeritus Fellow.

Sprigge was educated at the Dragon School, Oxford, and Bryanston in Dorset. He studied English at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (1952–1955), then switched to philosophy, completing his PhD under A. J. Ayer.

Long concerned with the nature of experience and the relationship between mind and reality, Sprigge was the philosopher who first posed the question made famous by Thomas Nagel: "What is it like to be a bat?" Throughout his career he argued that physicalism or materialism is not only false, but has contributed to a distortion of our moral sense. He was an advocate of animal rights and defended an environmental ethic.

The author of The Vindication of Absolute Idealism (1984), Sprigge defended a panpsychist version of absolute idealism, according to which reality consists of bits of experience combined into a certain kind of coherent whole. His work presents several new arguments in favor of the plausibility of such an account. He also defended a version of determinism in which all moments of time are intrinsically present and only relatively past or future. Time is unreal, he argued. What we experience as temporal transition is an illusion. Though a skeptic of traditional theism, Sprigge considered himself a believer in an impersonal God. He would eventually become a Unitarian. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1991 to 1992 and Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In his last book, The God of Metaphysics (2006), he argued for the existence of a "God of Philosophers" worthy of worship. Sprigge's metaphysics is an creative synthesis of Spinoza, F. H. Bradley, William James, George Santayana and Alfred North Whitehead. A Festschrift for Sprigge appeared on the day he died: Pierfrancesco Basile & Leemon B. McHenry (Eds.), Consciousness, Reality and Value: Essays in Honour of T. L. S. Sprigge (Frankfurt, Ontos Verlag, 2007). [wiki]
Daarin een hoofdstuk van Peter Forest:  “Sprigge’s Spinoza.” (Zie onder iets meer)

Selectie van Timothy L. S. Sprigge’s werk

  • The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham (1968)
  • Facts, Words and Beliefs. International Library of Philosophy and Scientific Method (1970)
  • Santayana: An examination of his philosophy (The Arguments of the philosophers) (1974)
  • The Vindication of Absolute Idealism (1984)
  • Theories of Existence. Edinburgh University Press, 1983. Penguin Books, May 1985
  • The Rational Foundation of Ethics (1988)
  • James and Bradley: American Truth and British Reality (1994)
  • The Phenomenology of Thought ed by. L. McHenry (unfinished) (2009)
  • The Importance of Subjectivity: Selected Essays in Metaphysics and Ethics ed by. L. McHenry (2011)

Timothy L. S. Sprigge over Spinoza

  • The significance of Spinoza's determinism. Mededelingen vanwege het Spinozahuis, 58, Brill 1989 (In 1988 in Rijnsburg gehouden lezing voor de Vereniging Het Spinozahuis), 16pp.
    [cf 4 pagina’s.
    http://www.despinoza.nl/site/scans/lviiispriggep01.shtml ]
  • Religion without the supernatural: Spinoza and Santayana, Medelingen vanwege het Spinozahuis, 69, Eburon Delft, 1993 (lezing in het Spinoza Lyceum in Amsterdam voor de Vereniging Het Spinozahuis), 26 pp.
  • Spinoza's identity theory. In: Inquiry 20 [1977] (1-4):419 – 445  Hieronder méér *)
  • The God of Metaphysics (2006)
    a Study of the Metaphysics and Religious Doctrines of Spinoza, Hegel, Kierkegaard, T. H. Green, Bernard Bosanquet, Josiah Royce, A. N. Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, and Concluding with a Defence of Pantheistic Idealism.
  • Lemma over o.a. “Spinoza” in de Oxford Companion to Philosophy, OUP, 1995 (waarvoor Sprigge ook lemma’s schreef over 'Ayer A J'; 'Bradley F H'; 'Broad C D'; 'Butler, Joseph'; 'Butler, Samuel'; 'James, William'; 'Ross, W.D.'; 'Santayana, George'; 'Schopenhauer Arthur'; 'Relations in metaphysics'; 'Tough-mindedness'; 'Verification Principle'; 'Will to Believe'.) [PDF]
  • "Spinoza", "Schopenhauer", "William James" in Ted Honderich (Ed.), The Philosophers: introducing Great Western Thinkers,. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995, 2001 [reprints van de vorige] Voor hoofdstuk over Spinoza zie books.google.

Zijn Lemma over “Spinoza in de Oxford Companion to Philosophy [OUP, 1995] breng ik in een volgend blog.

Sprigozisme



Peter Forrest, "Sprigge’s Spinoza." In: Pierfrancesco Basile & Leemon B. McHenry (Eds.), Consciousness, Reality and Value: Essays in Honour of T. L. S. Sprigge (Frankfurt, Ontos Verlag, 2007). Books.google
Behandelt hoofdstuk 8 van Theories of Existence [Edinburgh University Press, 1983. Penguin Books, May 1985], waarin Sprigge Spinoza zo behandelt, dat Forrest spreekt van Sprigozisme.

Geen interpretatie, maar rationele reconstructie
What we are looking for in the case of thinkers like Spinoza is not interpretation so much as rational reconstruction: what Spinoza might have said if he had had the benefit of good contemporary philosophy education, and if he had kept up with four hundred years of scientific progress. Accordingly Sprigge in his ac-count of Spinoza says, "In what follows I shall sketch a view... which is essentially Spinozistic, but in which the argumentation and some of the details... are rather what I think is best said today by one who would recommend a Spinozistic point of view...".2 It is in this spirit that I introduce T. B. Sprigoza, who shows how Absolute Idealism solves three problems with Spinoza's metaphysics. Moreover, Sprigozism coheres remarkably well with contemporary science. There remains, however, the most serious defect in Spinoza's thought, namely his version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason.
[..] Hij voert relatie-begrip in…So where Spinoza talks of distinct mental and physical attributes, Sprigoza considers relations between them, notably that of awareness or, if you prefer, knowledge by acquaintance. And Sprigoza prudently ignores all but two of the infinity of divine attributes.
*) Of the two main interpretations of Spinoza's theory of the identity of the attributes, in particular those of Thought and Extension, the objective interpretation is now almost universally preferred to the subjective. Rejection of the subjective interpretation, according to which the attributes are merely our ways of cognizing a reality whose real essence remains unknown, is certainly justified, but the objective theory comes too near to replacing the identity by a mere correlation of diff rents to be quite satisfactory. Is it not better to say that Thought and Extension represent two complementary conceptions of reality which are both correct? Yes, but in saying so some commentators ascribe to mind, as Spinoza conceives it, an unplausibly abstract status. An alternative proposal is made as to a way in which Spinoza might be right in essentials, though it requires that a certain tension in Spinozism as to the nature of body be resolved in a particular direction. ' [van Philpapers]
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Blog van 14-11-2009: Op weg naar Santayana
Blog van 06-12-2009: George Santayana (1863 - 1952): Locke..."a terrible come down after Spinoza"
Blog van 07-12-2009: George Santayana (1863 - 1952) "Spinoza is a great master"
Blog van 19-04-2013: Is Spinozisme een godsdienst?
Blog van 24-04-2015: George Santayana (1863 - 1952) "Spinoza filled me with joy and enthusiasm"

Foto van hier. Info plus z’n bibliografie hier.  Waar zijn nalatenschap wordt bewaard zie je hier.

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