Richard Mason’s artikel "Concrete Logic" bij #Spinoza

Vier jaar geleden had ik een kleine serie blogs over Richard Mason:

31-08-2014 Op zoek naar Spinoza scholar Richard Mason
01-09-2014 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

De Reviewer in NDPR schreef:

“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.