Over de Spinoza-anthologie die Graeme Hunter samenstelde - #Spinoza

In vervolg op een hele rij eerdere blogs waarin ik essaybundels of anthologieën gewijd aan Spinoza signaleerde (ik overweeg er nog eens een inhoudsopgave van te maken) is er eindelijk aanleiding om ook aan deze van Graeme Hunter aandacht te geven. Het werk draagt een titel die ook aan vele blogs hier zou kunnen worden gegeven.

Graeme Hunter (Ed.), Spinoza. The Enduring Questions [Essays collected in honour of David Savan (1916-1992)]. Toronto / Buffalo / London: University of Toronto Press [series Toronto studies in philosophy], 1994. - XVIII, 182 pages - Ill.

A collection of papers by prominent Spinoza scholars from around the world, addressing the enduring importance of Spinoza's thought on such questions as the nature of time and eternity, personal identity, immortality, miracles, hermeneutics, emotion, skepticism, and truth. The volume is dedicated to the memory of David Savan, whose last and most comprehensive essay on Spinoza is printed in the collection for the first time. [info en cover cf. Amazon]

TOC [samengesteld m.b.v. de Duitse Spinoza Bibliografie; cf. ook bij WorldCat]

1. David Savan, Spinoza on Duration, Time and Eternity, pp. 3-30.

2. James C. Morrison, Spinoza on the Self, Personal Identity, and Immortality, pp. 31-47

3. Leslie Armour, Knowledge, Idea and Spinoza's Notion of Immortality, pp. 48-63.

4. Edwin Curley, Notes on a Neglected Masterpiece: Spinoza and the Science of Hermeneutics, pp. 64-99 [cf. hier op Google.docs]

5. Manfred Walther, Spinoza's Critique of Miracles: A Miracle of Criticism? pp. 100-112

6. Laura Byrne, Reason and Emotion in Spinoza's Ethics: The Two Infinities, pp. 113-125.

7. Douglas Odegard, Spinoza and Cartesian Scepticism, pp. 126-139.

8. Dan Nesher, Spinoza's Theory of Truth, pp. 140-177

Later ontdekte ik dat het eerste deel van het boek hier als PDF is in te zien; de inhoudsopgave daaruit heb ik er nog eens naast gezet.
Toevoeging: zie de link naar het boek aan 't eind van 't blog...

 

Om een goede indruk van het boek te krijgen – voor als we het ooit eens tegenkomen – haal ik hier het gedegen review naar binnen van Genevieve Lloyd, in: The Philosophical Quarterly (1950-), Vol. 47, No. 189 (Oct., 1997), pp. 547-550

The figure of David Savan dominates this important new volume of essays on Spinoza, dedicated to Savan's memory. Several of the essays explore themes associated with his scholarly work on Spinoza; and the collection includes his own significant, previously unpublished paper, 'Spinoza on Duration, Time, and Eternity'. Here Savan explores the difficult and controversial issues raised by the concluding sections of the Ethics, where Spinoza describes himself as moving beyond what concerns ‘the present life'. Commentators frequently dismiss or ignore these strange and perplexing sections; those who do attend to them usually struggle to make even limited sense of Spinoza's doctrine. Savan offers a thoughtful and sympathetic reading of it, stressing its integration with the treatment of the imagination earlier in the Ethics. The reading centres on the complexities of the mind's understanding of the essence of the body which is its object. That is not unusual. What is novel is Savan's ingenious juxtaposition of this self-understanding with the peculiar features of indexical knowledge.

Savan emphasizes Spinoza's treatment of imagination as the representation of presence, and its ramifications for understanding the relations between imagination and time. In imagination and memory, ideas indexically represent a body as present now; and in Spinoza's highest form of knowledge, scientia intuitiva, the self-reflective mind indexically represents its body as eternal. The juxtaposition of eternity and indexicality may well seem surprising. But Savan's manceuvre here rests on thinking through what must be involved in a mind, which is the idea of its body, coming to understand the essence of that very body under the form of eternity. Sayan argues that the mind's conceptual action must here reflexively indicate its own body, and hence itself, as proceeding necessarily from productive nature, and hence as eternal.

The affinities that emerge between imagination and intuitive knowledge are illuminating, not only for the concluding sections of the Ethics, but for Spinoza's treatment of the relations between the lower and higher forms of knowledge in the work as a whole. Here Savan takes further some of the insights into Spinoza's treatment of imagination which he had already explored in an earlier paper, discussed by several of the other contributors, 'Spinoza: Scientist and Theorist of Scientific Method', published in 1986. Savan's new essay explores further the importance of bodily awareness in Spinoza's philosophy, and the close connections thus made between reason, imagination and emotion. The mind's eternity is not to be understood in terms of a continued duration; it is rather a way of conceiving generative nature — the very existence of its body, known indexically while the body still exists.

If we persist in thinking that the only satisfactory form of eternal life must involve continued existence after death, an eternity understood in terms of time, Spinoza's version of it will remain a disappointment. But the strength of Savan's interpretation is that it emphasizes Spinoza's refusal to define eternity in terms of time, without surrendering the mind's individuality. It is the individual self that is the proper subject of the mind's intuitive knowledge of eternity. What thus allows Sayan to retain the individuality of the mind is the rapprochement he finds between Spinoza's higher forms of knowledge and the bodily awareness usually associated only with imagination and memory. Intuitive knowledge does not depend on body in the direct way that imagining does. But nor does it completely transcend body. And the indexicality of the mind's exercise of intuitive knowledge, paralleling the indexicality of imagination, ensures that it is our individual selves that we understand as eternal.

In this respect the versions of Spinoza's doctrine of eternity offered by other contributions to the collection are less radical than Savan's. For James Morrison, in ‘Spinoza on the Self, Personal Identity, and Immortality', what Spinoza sees as eternal is not really the self but the eternal truths it knows. Leslie Armour, in 'Knowledge, Idea and Spinoza's Notion of Immortality', stresses, like Sayan, the importance of self-awareness. But what the eternity of the mind amounts to for Armour is knowledge of the good in our lives, of a kind not yet fully expressed in the temporal domain — a knowledge of which imagination and the passions deprive us. But this, as Armour notes, creates a problem for Spinoza. If to attain eternity means to shed all the confusions of passion and imagination, how could it be 'we' who attain it? Is the goal not just a fantasy? Are the self-ideas which are supposed to be the bearers of eternity perhaps after all simply the 'imaginative fantasies' that Spinoza wanted to overcome? A similar problem is raised by Laura Byrne in 'Reason and Emotion in Spinoza’s Ethics: the Two Infinities'. Byrne's main concern is to explore the ethical implications of Spinoza's distinction between the infinite given to reason and the ‘false infinite' given to imagination. But she focuses also on a 'serious flaw' that seems to follow from Spinoza's treatment of imagination for his theory of salvation: to escape the infinite series apprehended through imagination is to escape individuality.

Unlike Savan's, these three essays interpret Spinoza as committed to shedding the direct awareness of body associated with the lower forms of knowledge. If that means shedding individuality along the way, that is either, as Byrne suggests, a `serious flaw' in Spinoza's theory of salvation, or an indication that he never really thought that individuality and eternity should be reconciled. Savan's interpretation of the relations between Spinoza's three forms of knowledge offers, I think, a richer account of his metaphysics and its ethical implications. But the four essays together offer a rewarding debate on one of the most difficult issues of Spinoza scholarship.

There is much else in this collection that will interest Spinoza scholars and students. Several contributors engage in revaluation of prevailing images of Spinoza, rethinking his philosophy in relation to more recent developments. Douglas Odegard's chapter 'Spinoza and Cartesian Scepticism' relates Spinoza to recent epistemological debate on `internalism' and 'externalism'. Dan Nesher, in 'Spinoza's Theory of Truth', pursues comparisons with Peirce's pragmatism, and sketches a reconstruction of Spinoza's theory of adequate knowledge as a theory of evolutionary cognition. In 'Spinoza's Critique of Miracles: a Miracle of Criticism?', Manfred Walther offers a critique of Spinoza's hermeneutical method. And in 'Notes on a Neglected Masterpiece: Spinoza and the Science of Hermeneutics', Edwin Curley also explores Spinoza's contribution to textual interpretation, with some interesting and thought-provoking reflections on how the interpretation of texts in the history of philosophy compares with the procedures of the natural sciences. Curley argues that the enterprises are not fundamentally different. Contrary to some recent literary models for the interpretation of historical texts, which suggest that there is no ultimate truth of the matter, the scholarly work of the historian of philosophy involves, he suggests, no less concern with establishing the facts than the work of the natural scientist. There is an intrinsic pleasure, Curley comments, to be found in coming to understand what our predecessors thought about the problems of philosophy — a pleasure difficult to imagine if we seriously believe there are no correct solutions.

The issues raised by Curley about the methodology of history of philosophy are too complex to treat with justice here. Some readers will disagree both with his comparisons with science, and with his explanation of the distinctive pleasures of history of philosophy as residing in discovering the facts about what our philosophical predecessors believed. The pleasures of the activity may seem to some to have more to do with recreating an imagined continuing conversation with philosophers of the past — an on-going debate in which nothing is ever finally resolved. Whether or not we think of it as 'science', the history of philosophy involves more than the painstaking discovery of what past philosophers believed, however important that exercise may be.

It is in the integration of the philosophical and the historical — the engagement with the texts in a continuing debate — that many find the distinctive pleasure of history of philosophy. Collectively, the papers in this volume are concerned at least as much with rethinking and reassessing the upshot of Spinoza's thought in the context of more recent philosophy as with establishing the truth of what Spinoza himself meant to say. The title of the volume speaks to the pleasure of continuing enquiry into enduring questions. But these essays also show that there is just as much interest in a continuing restatement of what Spinoza's versions of the 'enduring questions' really are as in establishing what his answers were. The volume is of a high standard, a fitting tribute to the memory of a fine practitioner of the history of philosophy, whether we conceive it as rational science or as a creative exercise of philosophical imagination.

University of New South Wales                                                         GENEVIEVE LLOYD

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Het is niet verwonderlijk en voegt ook wel iets aan dit review toe dat Genevieve Lloyd de hoofdstukken 1, 4 en 5 [ en alleen die hoofdstukken] in de door haar geredigeerde vierdelige Spinoza. Critical assessments [2001] binnenhaalde.

Er waren meer reviews van Graeme Hunter (ed.) The Enduring Questions. zoals:  
D.C.K. Curry in: Philosophy in Review, Vol 15, No 4 (1995) [cf.]
Steven Nadler, Review of Graeme Hunter (ed.), Spinoza: The Enduring Questions, in: History of European Ideas (1995). [cf.]
Don Garrett in: Journal of the History of Philosophy 34 (3)  (1996), pp. 460-461.
G. H. R. Parkinson, Recent work on Spinoza. In: British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Volume 5, 1997 - Issue 2. Daarin besprak hij zeven werken waaronder Spinoza: The Enduring Questions. Graeme Hunter (ed.). [cf.]

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Belangrijke toevoeging      

Ik kreeg door dat hier het PDF van Graeme Hunter (ed.), Spinoza: The Enduring Questions te vinden is. Ook hier.