In
februari 2008 verscheen Charlie Huenemann (ed.), Interpreting Spinoza: Critical Essays. Cambridge University Press,
2008
Ik
signaleerde het in een blog van 23-05-2008, schafte het mij aan (het was in het eerste jaar van mijn Spinozastudie) en besprak de
eerste helft ervan op 10-07-2008: “Een inspirerend en uitdagend boek over
Spinoza´s filosofie.” Een vervolgbespreking kan ik niet vinden, dus daar is het
wellicht niet meer van gekomen.
Zojuist zie
ik dat het boek gedigitaliseerd staat op epdf.tips. Daaruit haal ik hier Huenemann’s Inleiding naar binnen - bedoeld als hommage aan de totstandkoming van een belangrijk boek:
Introduction Charlie Huenemann
Spinoza selected a seal for his correspondence that was both clever and fitting. It was a design with his initials, a stemmed rose, and the word ‘‘Caute,’’ or: with caution. We might suppose that he took this as a motto for himself, to act always with caution; but since his own name connoted the rose (espina is Spanish for ‘‘thorn’’), it is more likely that he was advising his correspondents to handle him with caution. He had fascinating visions to offer – but beware the thorns! And his readers soon were pricked by them, as they discovered that Spinoza denied many things thought to be necessary for a civil life: free will, the traditional distinction between good and evil, heaven and hell, and the existence of a benevolent creator. Spinoza became known as an impious atheist, and philosophers over the next two centuries were both attracted and stung by what he wrote. Philosophers in more recent times have found Spinoza to be thorny as well, perhaps not so much because of his heretical views, but because of the sheer difficulty of his great work, the Ethics. It seems that, in his attempt to lay out his thought as clearly as possible, with sharp definitions, axioms, and demonstrations, Spinoza made his philosophy well-nigh ungraspable. It is not at all unusual to hear a well-intentioned reader despair, ‘‘I know there is something powerful in there, but I can’t quite get hold of it.’’ Still, more and more philosophers have found their way into this deductive fortress, and have written about what they have found there in increasingly clear and precise ways. This volume of essays, we hope, adds to this broad, communal effort of excavation and interpretation, not only of the Ethics, but of his treatises on theology and politics as well. There are indeed many powerful things in Spinoza’s philosophy, and we can make sense of a great many of them. One great virtue of this collection of essays is that they provide penetrating discussion of three important domains of Spinoza’s philosophy: metaphysics, psychology, and politics. Furthermore, while these essays were written independently for this volume, several interesting connections can [2 CHARLIE HUENEMANN] be found among them. So, for example, the essays by Nadler, Della Rocca, and Garrett all end up exploring various dimensions of the ‘‘in’’ relation in Spinoza’s philosophy; Rosenthal and Huenemann offer different estimations of how successful Spinoza was in making room for autonomous thought; James, Sorell, and Garber all discuss the power of the imagination and its role in Spinoza’s political thought. The collection thus offers broad coverage, plus the virtue of presenting several ideas in different perspectives, both of which are crucial for grasping the wholeness of Spinoza’s philosophical vision. This volume of essays also pays tribute to a scholar who has devoted his career to helping others make better sense of Spinoza’s thought. Edwin Curley has been a translator, an interpreter, and a facilitator of fundamental importance. The first volume of his translation, The Collected Works of Spinoza (Princeton, 1985), made available, for the first time in English, a critical edition of the Ethics along with several other works. It is fair to say that readers who want a more accurate sense of what Spinoza wrote than what Curley offers will need to go and learn Latin and Dutch for themselves (and even so, they will still need to make use of the valuable textual commentary in Curley’s edition). Moreover, in Spinoza’s Metaphysics (Harvard, 1969), Behind the Geometrical Method (Princeton, 1988), and in many essays, Curley has developed new and compelling ways to think about Spinoza’s metaphysical, ethical, and political projects, ways that have shaped the terrain of contemporary Spinoza scholarship. Finally, Curley has helped build a scholarly bridge across the Atlantic, bringing American and French students of Spinoza into fruitful dialogue with one another. This overly brief account gestures only toward what Curley has done for Spinoza studies. But his contributions to the history of modern philosophy as a whole are equally impressive. His book, Descartes Against the Skeptics (Harvard, 1978), helped situate Descartes’s Meditations with respect to various kinds of skepticism, and offered (again) a new and compelling interpretation of that work. His edition of Hobbes’s Leviathan was the first edition in English to incorporate the variations found in the Latin versions of that work. Other essays published by Curley – far too many to mention individually – examine thinkers as diverse as Montaigne, Castellio, Locke, Maimonides, Leibniz, Calvin, and Pufendorf, and topics as diverse as religious toleration, Christian theism, the book of Job, the state of nature, certainty, rationalism, teleology, the soul, personal identity, dreaming, and logic. And that is not yet all; we are assured that there are more works to come. Each contributor to this volume was eager to do something to honor Curley’s long and productive career. This is not only because of his [Introduction 3] scholarly contributions, but also because of his scholarly attributes: in both print and in person, Ed Curley is patient, serious, honest, and encouraging. He has helped many scholars, of all ranks, to develop their careers and to enter into productive discussions. He has shown many of us how to approach texts – with serious philosophical intent, abetted by sound historical knowledge and a degree of literary sensitivity. It is with gratitude that we dedicate this volume to him.
Spinoza selected a seal for his correspondence that was both clever and fitting. It was a design with his initials, a stemmed rose, and the word ‘‘Caute,’’ or: with caution. We might suppose that he took this as a motto for himself, to act always with caution; but since his own name connoted the rose (espina is Spanish for ‘‘thorn’’), it is more likely that he was advising his correspondents to handle him with caution. He had fascinating visions to offer – but beware the thorns! And his readers soon were pricked by them, as they discovered that Spinoza denied many things thought to be necessary for a civil life: free will, the traditional distinction between good and evil, heaven and hell, and the existence of a benevolent creator. Spinoza became known as an impious atheist, and philosophers over the next two centuries were both attracted and stung by what he wrote. Philosophers in more recent times have found Spinoza to be thorny as well, perhaps not so much because of his heretical views, but because of the sheer difficulty of his great work, the Ethics. It seems that, in his attempt to lay out his thought as clearly as possible, with sharp definitions, axioms, and demonstrations, Spinoza made his philosophy well-nigh ungraspable. It is not at all unusual to hear a well-intentioned reader despair, ‘‘I know there is something powerful in there, but I can’t quite get hold of it.’’ Still, more and more philosophers have found their way into this deductive fortress, and have written about what they have found there in increasingly clear and precise ways. This volume of essays, we hope, adds to this broad, communal effort of excavation and interpretation, not only of the Ethics, but of his treatises on theology and politics as well. There are indeed many powerful things in Spinoza’s philosophy, and we can make sense of a great many of them. One great virtue of this collection of essays is that they provide penetrating discussion of three important domains of Spinoza’s philosophy: metaphysics, psychology, and politics. Furthermore, while these essays were written independently for this volume, several interesting connections can [2 CHARLIE HUENEMANN] be found among them. So, for example, the essays by Nadler, Della Rocca, and Garrett all end up exploring various dimensions of the ‘‘in’’ relation in Spinoza’s philosophy; Rosenthal and Huenemann offer different estimations of how successful Spinoza was in making room for autonomous thought; James, Sorell, and Garber all discuss the power of the imagination and its role in Spinoza’s political thought. The collection thus offers broad coverage, plus the virtue of presenting several ideas in different perspectives, both of which are crucial for grasping the wholeness of Spinoza’s philosophical vision. This volume of essays also pays tribute to a scholar who has devoted his career to helping others make better sense of Spinoza’s thought. Edwin Curley has been a translator, an interpreter, and a facilitator of fundamental importance. The first volume of his translation, The Collected Works of Spinoza (Princeton, 1985), made available, for the first time in English, a critical edition of the Ethics along with several other works. It is fair to say that readers who want a more accurate sense of what Spinoza wrote than what Curley offers will need to go and learn Latin and Dutch for themselves (and even so, they will still need to make use of the valuable textual commentary in Curley’s edition). Moreover, in Spinoza’s Metaphysics (Harvard, 1969), Behind the Geometrical Method (Princeton, 1988), and in many essays, Curley has developed new and compelling ways to think about Spinoza’s metaphysical, ethical, and political projects, ways that have shaped the terrain of contemporary Spinoza scholarship. Finally, Curley has helped build a scholarly bridge across the Atlantic, bringing American and French students of Spinoza into fruitful dialogue with one another. This overly brief account gestures only toward what Curley has done for Spinoza studies. But his contributions to the history of modern philosophy as a whole are equally impressive. His book, Descartes Against the Skeptics (Harvard, 1978), helped situate Descartes’s Meditations with respect to various kinds of skepticism, and offered (again) a new and compelling interpretation of that work. His edition of Hobbes’s Leviathan was the first edition in English to incorporate the variations found in the Latin versions of that work. Other essays published by Curley – far too many to mention individually – examine thinkers as diverse as Montaigne, Castellio, Locke, Maimonides, Leibniz, Calvin, and Pufendorf, and topics as diverse as religious toleration, Christian theism, the book of Job, the state of nature, certainty, rationalism, teleology, the soul, personal identity, dreaming, and logic. And that is not yet all; we are assured that there are more works to come. Each contributor to this volume was eager to do something to honor Curley’s long and productive career. This is not only because of his [Introduction 3] scholarly contributions, but also because of his scholarly attributes: in both print and in person, Ed Curley is patient, serious, honest, and encouraging. He has helped many scholars, of all ranks, to develop their careers and to enter into productive discussions. He has shown many of us how to approach texts – with serious philosophical intent, abetted by sound historical knowledge and a degree of literary sensitivity. It is with gratitude that we dedicate this volume to him.
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