Henry E. Allison (1937 -) "I certainly hope to return to Spinoza"

zei Henry E. Allison in het interview dat Steven A. Gross op 29 november 1995 met hem had [cf. PDF]. Of hij dit deed en of dit tot nieuwe publicaties leidde is mij niet bekend.

Ik attendeer hier graag op de teksten van hem over Spinoza die op internet te vinden zijn.

Henry Edward Allison (80 jaar) is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of California, Davis, and a foremost interpreter of the work of Immanuel Kant, Spinoza, German Idealism, and eighteenth and nineteenth-century philosophy. [cf. & cf; maar toch vooral met Kant zoals ook blijkt uit zijn pagina bij academia.edu, waar alleen publicaties over Kant te vinden zijn). Maar hij heeft zich enige malen ook intensief met Spinoza bezig gehouden.

We kennen hem op dit blog vooral vanwege zijn lezing en artikel

• Henry E. Allison, “The Eternity of Mind: Comments on Matson on Spinoza." In: Edwin Curley & Pierre-François Moreau (Eds.), Spinoza: Issues and Directions, [The Proceedings of the Chicago Spinoza Conference (1986: Chicago, Ill.)]. Leiden: Brill, 1990, pp 96-101 – In z'n geheel te lezen bij books.google

Abstract

In "Body Essence and Mind Eternity in Spinoza", Wallace Matson has made an insightful and suggestive attempt to defend a literal reading of Spinoza's doctrine of the eternity of the mind. Spinoza, according to Matson, means just what he says when he claims that "The human Mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the Body, but something of it remains which is eternal". The most valuable aspect of Matson's account is his discussion of essence in Spinoza. In brief, his view is that the essence of a particular thing is its intrinsic nature or structure considered as a pure possibility, in abstraction from its concrete realization in the order of nature. The troublesome claim that something of the mind "remains which is eternal" can be taken merely to indicate that there is some "eternal" aspect to the mind that has not yet been considered.

 

Eerder was van hem verschenen een studie uit 1975 die in een gewijzigde editie verscheen in 1987 en die intussen als PDF te downloaden is:

• Henry E. Allison, Benedict de Spinoza. Boston: Twayne [series World Authors], 1975 [239 pp]; rev. ed. as Benedict de Spinoza: An Introduction, Yale University Press; 1987 [254 pp]. Te downloaden als PDF van hier;

Content
1 The life of Spinoza
2 Spinoza's philosophy in its hstorical context
3 God
4 The human mind
5 Bondage, virtue and freedom
6 Man and the state
7 Revelation, scripture, religion
Notes and references; Selected bibliography; Index

From the rear cover of this 254 page book: "This highly acclaimed book provides a general introduction to the life and works of one of the major philosophers of the seventeenth century. In this revised edition, Henry E. Allison has rewritten the central chapters on the 'Ethics', taking into consideration the most important recent literature on Spinoza's metaphysics, epistemology, psychology, and moral theory. This is an excellent general introduction to Spinoza's thought. Allison expounds Spinoza sympathetically, but without glossing over the difficulties. Though written in a way which should make it accessible to undergraduates, his book also contains much that would make it of interest to more advanced students." And "An exposition that is lucid and direct as well as faithful to the intricate reasoning. Without either popularizing condescension, this presentation attains an exacting overview of the entire philosophy, which is consistently meaningful and accurate." [Cf. abebooks en amazon]

Review by C. L. Hardin. In: The Philosophical Review, Vol. 99, No. 1 (Jan., 1990), pp. 114-116 [cf.] *) & Review by William Sacksteder, in: Journal of the History of Philosophy, Volume 17, Number 1, January 1979 [cf.]

Van zijn hand is het lemma over Spinoza in de Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (te vinden op internet)

• Henry E. Allison, Lemma Spinoza, Benedict de (1632-77). In de Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy - 26 pagina's [Cf. & PDF]

 

Tenslotte geeft de Spinoza-bibliografie nog:

• Henry E. Allison, “Spinoza and the philosophy of immanence: Reflections on Yovel's 'The Adventures of Immanence'.” In: Inquiry 35 (1992), 55-67 [Cf.]
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Zijn foto: 'n still uit video van zijn lezing tijdens UCSD Philosophy: Then and Now op 16 april 2011

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Aanvulling
*) Uit Review by C. L. Hardin [In: The Philosophical Review, Vol. 99, No. 1 (Jan., 1990)]:
 anyone who seeks an overview of Spinoza's thought without being prepared to engage in the sort of full-scale encounter with the Ethics demanded by the recent books of Delahunty and Bennett. The work with which it best compares is Stuart Hampshire's Spinoza. Both Hampshire's and Allison's books are well written and accessible. Both provide a biography, a discussion of the historical context of Spinoza's ideas, and a survey of the political and theological writings as well as of the Ethics and its related works. But there are important differences between the two. As a guide to the actual texts, Allison's book is much to be preferred to Hampshire's. Armed only with the appropriate 131 pages in Allison, one who encountered the Ethics for the first time could work through it and emerge with a tolerably accurate understanding of the argument as well as some sense of both its shortcomings and the problems involved in its interpretation. I seriously doubt that one who equips herself with Hampshire's work would fare nearly as well, for Hampshire seems more concerned to capture what he conceives to be the spirit of Spinoza's system of thought than the sequence of the arguments through which it is expressed."

Uit review by D. R. L. [in: The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 32, No. 3 (Mar., 1979), pp. 531-532].
Allison does not shrink from addressing most of the major cruxes of Spinoza-interpretation (e.g., the status of the attributes, psycho-physical parallelism, the non-temporal eternity of the mind); his accounts, while far more than simple palliatives, do not make these any less excruciating. He is especially good in defense of an objectivistic rendition of the attributes [..].