Louis
Russell gaf in eigen beheer via Amazon een klein boekje uit met een best
pittige titel, zo liet hij in een tweet weten:
Louis
Russell, Spinoza's Science: The Ethics
of Knowledge. Independently
published (June 1, 2018) - 54 pages
Of
we er veel van kunnen verwachten en of de titel misschien niet teveel belooft, vraag
ik me af als je van z’n Inleiding kennis neemt die zich via Amazon laat lezen en die ik hier binnenhaal:
Introduction
In his famous work, Ethics Demonstrated in Geometric Order, Baruch Spinoza invites the philosopher to explore the possibility of pure intellectual joy as a way of human life. This book serves as a philosophical introduction to the best of Spinoza's offerings in the Ethics: namely, how the performance of Spinozist science itself constitutes the acme of human achievement. In a short space, I shall trace Spinoza's trifold distinction between kinds of knowledge, then uncover the ethical conclusions one must necessarily draw should Spinoza's premises be taken as acceptable.
In his famous work, Ethics Demonstrated in Geometric Order, Baruch Spinoza invites the philosopher to explore the possibility of pure intellectual joy as a way of human life. This book serves as a philosophical introduction to the best of Spinoza's offerings in the Ethics: namely, how the performance of Spinozist science itself constitutes the acme of human achievement. In a short space, I shall trace Spinoza's trifold distinction between kinds of knowledge, then uncover the ethical conclusions one must necessarily draw should Spinoza's premises be taken as acceptable.
Having
studied Spinoza for some time, I have at different moments confronted different
aspects of the same dominant strain in his thinking: this line of force
concerns the ethical implications of what we think we know, what we do know,
and what we can know, if only we exercise our reason. This undercurrent in the Ethics does not simply tie knowledge to
ethics but sets the grasping of a certain kind of knowledge—intuitive
science—equal to the human being's highest ethical calling. But any
confrontation with this line of thought outside the graduate seminar, outside
the Latin language, outside of Spinoza's basic premise for his normative
prescriptions—the pursuit of an active, constant joy that arises necessarily
from a rational engagement with lived experience—hazards to yield more of the
confusion and frustration that Spinoza labored to cure than that persistent joy
he labored to inculcate in his readers. The purpose of this book is to condense
this dominant strain of his thinking in a way that will assist with either an
academic or a personal reading of the Ethics,
an aim which will conceptually focus the reader's attention on the proverbial
forest, as well as its most beautiful trees.
This
is largely a book about knowledge, or how Spinoza marries knowing with being,
and further how he thinks of being as the foundation of ethics. In order to
present a clear and contrastive account of how Spinoza conceives of knowledge (cognitio), we must first understand how
things go wrong for us knowers. This going wrong, Spinoza calls 'the first kind
of knowledge'. Yet, like the Ethics itself,
statements about the strengths of Spinozism will require a preliminary backdrop
that fills Spinoza's key concepts in with content. Before speaking about
Spinoza's epistemological theses, I must begin with a discussion of his method
and its place in the history of philosophy.
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