Vier
jaar geleden had ik een kleine serie blogs over Richard Mason:
31-08-2014 Op
zoek naar Spinoza scholar Richard Mason01-09-2014 Richard Mason (1948 – 2006) a unique Spinoza scholar
01-09-2014 Richard Mason (1948 – 2006) zijn werken over Spinoza
02-09-2014 Richard Mason (1948 – 2006) Why Spinoza?
Verblijdend
vond ik het dat in de recente korte serie blogs over “Bij Spinoza lees je
nergens Deus sive Ratio” [1], [2], [3], [4], in reactie op de eerste van de reeks Cornelis
Bouter, die ik hiervoor nog eens hartelijk dank, zinvolle informatie verschafte
over wat Richard Mason in zijn artikel "Concrete Logic" schreef over causa sive ratio.
Aanleiding
voor mij om op zoek te gaan naar dat artikel. Het verscheen in: Olli Koistinen
and John Biro (Eds.), Spinoza:
Metaphysical Themes [Oxford University Press, 2002]. In het derde blog over
Mason, “zijn werken over Spinoza,” had ik een link opgenomen naar dat boek. Daarin
is het artikel te lezen op de drie of vier laatste pagina’s na. Verder zoekend
bleek het betreffende artikel ook opgenomen te zijn in Mason’s Spinoza: Logic, Knowledge and Religion (dat
postuum verscheen in 2007), en daarin waren bij books.google de laatste
bladzijden te lezen. Uit beide vindplaatsen kon ik dus het hele artikel
reconstrueren
Richard Mason, "Concrete Logic"
Deels
dus te vinden in: Olli Koistinen and John Biro (Eds.), Spinoza: Metaphysical Themes. Oxford University Press, 2002 [p. 73
t/m 84 via books.google]
voor
de rest te vinden in: Richard Mason, Spinoza:
Logic, Knowledge and Religion. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2007 [p. 72 t/m 74
via books.google [de heruitgave van Routledge in 2016, waarin via books.google- van p. 80 – 94 - slechts een deel van het artikel te lezen is, heeft weer eindnoten.]
Aanvulling
19 juli 2019 -
Hier het PDF van “Concrete Logic” uit het 2002-boek
“In “Concrete Logic”, Richard Mason analyzes Spinoza’s basic
ontology of things and their relations, and offers an anti-logicist reading of
Spinoza. While his point is surely right, it is not clear that anybody really
adopts the position against which he is arguing – namely, that for Spinoza,
causal relations between things really just are logical relations between
propositions.”
Ik
krijg hieruit niet de indruk dat de reviewer, Steven Nadler notabene, opgepakt
had dat Mason inging tegen de invloedrijke benadering van Edwin Curley. Mason
schreef:
Yet, writes Curley - 'One thing every interpreter of
Spinoza agrees on is that Spinoza connects the causal relation with the
relation of logical consequence ... 3 - which suggests that this is
not physics (or psychology) at all, but logic. The difference between physics
and logic certainly sounds significant, with significant repercussions. At any
rate, this looks like some kind of border region: perhaps on or around the
boundary between metaphysics (or First Philosophy, in Cartesian terminology)
and physics, or between geometry and mathematical physics. The crossing of
those borders has proved to be philosophically perilous. [p. 73]
3 'On
Bennett's interpretation of Spinoza's Monism', in God and Nature: Spinoza's Metaphysics, Y. Yovel, ed., (Leiden:
BrilL 1991), p. 48.
En iets verder: “So, to summarize: in terms of bodies
specifically (corpora), or particular
things more widely (res particalares),
Spinoza's subject matter, and the nature of its interrelationships, was not
obscure. He did not mention logic nor suggest that what he called a cause had any relation to logic. He said
that individual things are caused by other individual things, in the most
concrete terms. All of this relates only to what exists and happens, not to the
truth or modality of what is said about what exists and happens. In Davidson's
language, we are faultlessly with "the analysis of causality;' rather than
with "the logical form of causal statements." As Davidson says, the
confusion of the two can be unfortunate; but Spinoza did not fall into it.” [p.
77]
“We may believe [in grasping Spinoza's system ] that
it contains a set of general principles about the world which need to be
related to existing, concrete reality. That view might seem to be encouraged by
the presence of wide, abstract principles and of specific empirical postulates.
General rules plus particular instances, as it were, generate the results:
physical truths about the world, psychological and moral truths about people.
That reading may be harmless for the consequences deduced with the aid of
Spinoza's empirical postulates, but it is seriously misleading when applied to
the basic steps in his thinking and disastrously so in the context of
understanding his grounding of science. [p.80]
Tegen Curley en de zijnen benadrukt Mason dat het bij
Spinoza niet ging om “general rules plus particular instances” en niet om “a
generalized abstraction, needing the addition of particular premises.” [p. 80]
“Spinoza's ideal model of explanation was never one of
general covering law + specific instance = result. What exists or happens in
nature never "follows" in that way from some general characteristics
of nature. What happens ("in nature") depends on other things that
happen ("in nature").” [p. 81]
Dát was het hoofdmotief van zijn artikel. Dat de
natuur volgens Spinoza zó in elkaar steekt, vinden we ook terug in zijn The God of Spinoza.
Tot slot neem ik de laatste bladzijde over uit het
tweede boek (vandaar p. 74] met zijn bespreking van causa sive ratio.
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