Samuel Newlands Reconceiving #Spinoza besproken

Nadat de review-site NDPR bijna twee maanden heeft stilgelegen wegens een sterfgeval van een centrale redacteur, is de draad weer opgepakt en als eerste review dat van Martin Lin geplaatst over het boek van

Samuel Newlands, Reconceiving Spinoza. Oxford University Press, 2018, 283pp. [cf. NDPR] [Cf. signalement in blog van 1 jan. 2018]

Het is een zeer gedegen en diepgaande bespreking van, zoals Lin het noemt: een “bold and ambitious book,” waarin “Samuel Newlands develops a new and systematic interpretation of Spinoza’s metaphysics.” Daarin legt Newlands het accent op: ‘conceiving’, op het hebben van "a multiplicity of concepts" en ziet hij Spinoza een “conceptualist strategy” uitwerken. Lin vindt het een ingenieuze en veelbelovende aanpak, maar werpt er een aantal overtuigende bezwaren tegen op. 



Toevoeging 26-9-2019.
Door Steven Nadler werd het boek besproken in  de

Journal of the History of Philosophy, Volume 57, Number 2, April 2019, pp.

346-347 Ik neem het hier over:

Samuel Newlands. Reconceiving Spinoza. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. x +

283. Cloth, $65.00.

In 1969, Edwin Curley published his Spinoza’s Metaphysics: An Essay in Interpretation. It was

a groundbreaking book in which Curley offers a bold and original account of Spinoza’s

metaphysical theses. In his highly unorthodox but hugely influential reading, he tries to

mitigate some of the ontological oddity of Spinoza’s claims that “whatever is, is in God,”

that “from God infinite things follow in infinite ways,” and that mind and body are “one and

the same thing,” by giving them a strictly causal reading. For subsequent scholars, whether

they agreed with Curley or not, there was no avoiding his interpretation.

Samuel Newlands seeks likewise to transform our reading of Spinoza in an

unconventional—and, as he recognizes, contentious—way. Like Curley, Newlands wants to

revise our understanding of the fundamentals of Spinoza’s metaphysics. He takes his lead

from a problem that Spinoza’s contemporaries, and even Spinoza himself, recognized—

what we might call the one/many problem. It is expressed by a question that “Lust,” one

of the characters in the dialogue that Spinoza inserts in his Short Treatise on God, Man and

His Well-Being, poses: How can we reconcile the unity of nature with the great diversity

that surrounds us? How to account for both the parsimony and plenitude of the world? In

Spinoza’s terms, how can Nature be both one (substance) and many (modes)?

Like Michael Della Rocca, whose recent Spinoza (2008) attempted to demonstrate that

the principle of sufficient reason (PSR) lies at the basis of practically every philosophical

thesis and decision that Spinoza takes, Newlands believes that there is a unique key principle

to understanding Spinoza’s metaphysics, as well as the moral philosophy that follows from

it. The key principle is not the PSR, however, but the CS, that is, the “conceptualist strategy,”

including its many and various but closely related offspring: conceptual dependence monism

(CDM), consistent conceptual variability, conceptual sensitivity, conceptual identification

etc. (Newlands’s book is a compelling and enjoyable read for Spinoza specialists, who

will appreciate the ambition of his project; but it is rather full of jargon, neologisms and

abbreviations, too much for my taste.) Newlands uses the conceptualist strategy to tackle a

number of enduring textual and philosophical problems in Spinoza, all in order “to preserve

the consistency of [Spinoza’s] monisms and pluralisms” (54). The strategy involves reducing

practically every metaphysical status and relationship to a matter of conceptualization.

Thus, Spinoza’s claims that God is Thought and God is Extension, that the world is one

and the world is many, that modes are necessary and modes are contingent etc., cannot

be properly understood independently of how the subjects of such claims are conceived—

which, Newlands insists, is distinct from claiming that it is all a matter of how the subjects

of such claims are epistemically or subjectively regarded.

To take an example from one of the central chapters, Newlands insists that even the

modal status of the finite modes of Nature (the ordinary things that populate the world)

is a matter of conceptualization (Chapter 4). One might think that Spinoza’s view is quite

simple: there is no contingency in Nature, everything is necessary. However, Newlands

demurs. “The modal status of a thing, such as whether it exists necessarily, is fixed by how

that thing is conceived with respect to certain intra-attribute features.” This is not to say

that a finite thing’s modal status is merely subjective. There is an objective truth value to

propositions about modality, but that truth is relative to some conceptual scheme.

The crucial move that Newlands makes, and that sets up much of his subsequent

argument, occurs in Chapter 3, where he insists that the various forms of dependence in

Spinoza’s system—causation, inherence, explanation, following from etc.—are all, in fact,

conceptual containment relations. It is not just a matter of coextension or covariation

between the former relations and the conceptual one; nor is it simply a matter of all such

relations involving or including or being expressible by conceptual dependence. Newlands

does not go for half measures. In his view, these are conceptual dependence relations, they

reduce to conceptual dependence—this is the central claim of conceptual dependence

monism. It is, he insists, the only way to preserve the consistency of Spinoza’s ontology.

Newlands pursues his case with great philosophical skill and admirable consistency.

Even the essences of things (Chapter 5) and their individuation (Chapter 6) are a function

of conceptual framework. Outside of how things are conceived, there is . . . well, nothing,

or at least nothing that can be said truly about them. It does not follow, however, that all

conceptual schemes are equal. But the preference for one scheme over another is not to be

based on its truth, on its capturing the way things “really are,” but on what Newlands calls

“practical” or moral grounds—on how a scheme better contributes to our power, activity,

freedom, virtue and flourishing.

This ambitious and stimulating book will be much discussed by Spinoza scholars, many

of whom will dispute its claims. Nevertheless, this is what original scholarship in the history

of philosophy is supposed to do: get us to rethink our assumptions about the philosophers

we study. There is a lot in Newlands book I do not agree with, but I am very glad I read it.

S t e v e n N a d l e r

University of Wisconsin-Madison