In
vervolg op het blog van 10-03-2015 “Marjorie Grene (1910 – 2009) bundelde
Spinoza (en maakte een vergelijking tussen Sartre en Spinoza)”, waarin
uiteraard ook het volgende boek dat zij co-editeerde
Marjorie
Grene & Debra Nails (eds.), Spinoza
and the Sciences. Dordrecht etc.: D. Reidel Publishing Company [Boston
Studies in the Philosophy; nu Springer],
1986
kan
ik inmiddels melden dat ik ontdekte dat het boek als PDF geüpload staat bij BookSC.
In
dat blog had ik ook de TOC, die ik hier nog eens breng.
TABLE
OF CONTENTS
[Het boek blijkt ook nog eens per hoofdstuk geüpload. Voor wie het handiger vindt alleen hoofdstukken te downloaden, geef ik de Pdf's daarheen bij de hoofdstukken aan]
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix
MARJORIE GRENE / Introduction xi
I.
SPINOZA AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURY SCIENCE
NANCY MAULL / Spinoza in the Century of
Science 3 [PDF]
ANDRE LECRIVAIN / Spinoza and Cartesian
Mechanics (translated by Debra Nails and Pascal Gallez) 15 [PDF]
HEINE SIEBRAND / Spinoza and the Rise of
Modern Science in the Netherlands 61 [PDF]
II.
SPINOZA: SCIENTIST
DAVID SAVAN / Spinoza: Scientist and
Theorist of Scientific Method 95 [PDF]
ALEXANDRE MATHERON / Spinoza and
Euclidean Arithmetic: The Example of the Fourth Proportional (translated by
David Lachterman) 125 [PDF]
III.
SPINOZA AND THE HUMAN SCIENCES: POLITICS AND HERMENEUTICS
JOSEPH AGASSI / Towards a Canonic
Version of Classical Political Theory 153 [PDF]
RICHARD H. POPKIN / Some New Light on
the Roots of Spinoza's Science of Bible Study 171 [PDF]
IV.
SCIENTIFIC-METAPHYSICAL REFLECTIONS
J. THOMAS COOK / Self-Knowledge as
Self-Preservation? 191 [PDF]
GENEVIEVE LLOYD / Spinoza's Version of
the Eternity of the Mind 211 [geen PDF]
V.
SPINOZA AND TWENTIETH CENTURY SCIENCE
HANS JONAS / Parallelism and
Complementarity: The Psycho-Physical Problem in Spinoza and in the Succession
of Niels Bohr 237 [PDF]
JOE D. VAN ZANDT / Res Extensa and the
Space-Time Continuum 249 [PDF]
MICHEL PATY / Einstein and Spinoza
(translated by Michel Paty and Robert S. Cohen) 267 [PDF]
VI.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
DEBRA NAILS / Annotated Bibliography of
Spinoza and the Sciences 305 [PDF]
INDEX LOCORUM 315
GENERAL INDEX 322
* * *
Ik voeg hieraan graag toe de verhelderende bespreking
door Don Garrett in: Philosophy of Science,
Vol. 55, No. 3 (Sep., 1988), pp. 480-482; het geeft een goed beeld van het
boek
MARJORIE °RENE AND DEBRA NAIIS (EDITORS). Spinoza
and the Sciences. Dordrecht: Reidel (1986), xix + 336 pp. $54.50
(cloth).
This collection, volume 91 in the Boston Studies in
the Philosophy of Science series, contains twelve essays, five of which were
originally presented at a sesquitercentenary symposium on "Spinoza and the
Sciences" held under the auspices of the Boston Colloquium for the
Philosonhv of Science. It also includes an introduction by Marjorie Grene and
an annotated bibliography by Debra Nails.
Spinoza was both interested and involved, in many different
ways, in the natural sciences. Nevertheless, as Grene acknowledges in her
introduction—and as many of the individual essays echo, in their own
terms—Spinoza fundamentally "failed to add . . . to the increasing body of
concrete knowledge of nature that seems to us so characteristic of his
century". This does not mean that Spinoza's thought bears no relation to
the sciences. But it does mean that a volume on "Spinoza and the
Sciences" will not be organized around concrete achievements in the
natural sciences in the way that one might expect of a similarly titled volume
concerning Descartes or Leibniz. Instead, the relations surveyed are, as Grene
emphasizes, more "varied".
The first three essays are concerned directly with
aspects of Spinoza's relation to the natural science of his time. In the
opening essay, Nancy Maull seeks to answer the question: "Why, if Spinoza
sustained a lively interest in experimental science, was he so estranged from
it philosophically?" Her tentative answer is that, because Spinoza's
funda-mental interests are elsewhere—in mastering the passions and achieving human
well being—his concern with the "truth" of ideas is really only a concern
with their internal characteristics, and not with their "fit" to the
world. In setting herself this question, Maull more or less takes it for
granted that Spinoza is philosophically "estranged" from experimental
science, a claim that is considerably stronger than the commonplace observation
that Spinoza's deepest concerns are ethical rather than experimental. It is
also a claim against which Edwin Curley has argued, forcefully and in detail,
in a classic paper (1973) that Maull cites but does not seriously try to
refute. Andre Lecrivain's forty-five page study explores Spinoza's handling of
Cartesian mechanics in the Principles of
Descartes' Phi-losophy, Spinoza's axiomatization of Parts I and II of
Descartes' Principles of Philosophy.
Lecrivain discusses the Cartesian conception of mechanics and notes a number of
ways in which Spinoza's exposition differs from Descartes', thereby suggesting
the kinds of criticisms and revisions that Spinoza might have proposed. Heine
Siebrand, in "Spinoza and the Rise of Modern Science in the
Netherlands", provides a useful descriptive account of the state of
seventeenth-century Dutch science; most of his evaluative and critical remarks,
however, are difficult to follow, perhaps as the result of difficulties of
translation.
Three concluding essays primarily address Spinoza's
bearing on twentieth-century nat-ural science. Hans Jonas briefly criticizes
Spinoza's monistic psycho-physical parallelism on the grounds that it is
committed to a deterministic view of mind and that it grants de facto priority
to the physical. He then goes on to explain convincingly why the technical
quantum-mechanical notion of complementarity does not provide a more promising
model of the relation between mind and body, without explaining why anyone
should really have thought that it would. Joe D. Van Zandt maintains that the
chief affinity of Spinozistic metaphysics with contemporary physics lies in
their mutual conception of space and time as derivative rather than
fundamental. Michel Paty's "Einstein and Spinoza" presents some of
Einstein's previously unpublished remarks about Spinoza from the Einstein
Archives at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and comments on some biographical
and philosophical parallels between the two, concentrating on their
determinism; he declines, however, to make any substantial claims about
Spinoza's influence on Einstein. Although the latter two essays make passing
reference to the idea that Spinoza's metaphysics anticipates contemporary
notions of "field", nothing in the collection begins to approach that
intriguing topic with the degree of detail or philosophical care exhibited in
Jonathan Bennett's recent discussion of "Spinoza's field metaphysic"
(1984). All six of the essays mentioned thus far—those concerned most directly
with Spinoza's relation to the natural sciences—exhibit (often avowedly) a
tendency to "suggest" or sketch "schematically", rather
than to demonstrate; all are notably tentative in their conclusions.
While the opening and concluding essays concern Spinoza's
relation to the natural sciences, two other essays concentrate on his
contributions to scientific disciplines outside the natural sciences. Although
he briefly documents Spinoza's interest in natural science, David Savan
emphasizes endeavor, particularly in the Tractatus
Politicus, to construct a science of politics, and he argues that his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, which
subjects the interpretation of the Bible to empirical and historical
considerations, makes Spinoza the "founder of scientific hermeneutics".
Taking up Spinoza's remark in the latter work that "the method of
interpreting Scripture does not widely differ from the method of interpreting
nature", Savan then distinguishes three broad principles that, he argues,
characterize Spinoza's scientific methodology in application to all of these
areas; his arguments, though brief, are on the whole persuasive. (Oddly,
however, he emphasizes an obscure claim that Spinoza designates
"possibility" as "a third truth value".) Joseph Agassi aims
to present Spinoza as "the leading contributor to what should count as the
classical political theory". More specifically, he characterizes Spinoza
as a crucial figure of the "realist" branch (with Machiavelli and
Hobbes) as opposed to the "Utopian" branch (Locke, Hume, Bentham,
Marx) of classic liberalism. Unfortunately, this distinction, while plausible,
is never made very clear; the paper as a whole, though provocative, suffers
from a lack of focus and clear argumentation. Among the most successful essays,
ironically, are the four that contain the least discussion—or at any rate the
least direct discussion—of Spinoza's relation to the special sciences. Richard
Popkin succinctly presents the fascinating results of his further historical
investigations into the influences on the Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus. J. Thomas Cook offers a generally sound
interpretation of Spinoza's crucial ethical doctrine that self-knowledge is the
most important way of increasing one's power of self-preservation. (However, he
also ascribes to him two claims—that all of our adequate ideas are restricted
to things that all bodies have in common, and that we are confused in believing
that we struggle to preserve ourselves—that seem to go considerably beyond what
the text warrants.) Genevieve Lloyd provides a good account of the way in which
the Spinozistic "eternity" of the mind involves, at least as one of
its aspects, the mind's reconciliation to its finiteness through an
appreciation of its relation to the one substance. And Alexandre Matheron
brilliantly illuminates Spinoza's much-abused distinction between the two
highest kinds of knowledge through a careful analysis, in its full Euclidean
context, of Spinoza's own favored example, that of finding a fourth
proportional (for example, 1/2 = 3/x). Matheron's essay is a paradigm of
well-reasoned and sympathetic interpretation, and will be essential reading for
anyone interested in understanding Spinoza's epistemology.
Despite some recurrent sketchiness and tentativeness,
the collection thus contains a number of valuable papers on a variety of
interesting and important Spinozistic topics.
Don Garrett, University of Utah. [cf. PDF]
REFERENCES
Bennett, Jonathan (1984), A Study of Spinoza's Ethics. Indianapolis: Hackett, Chapter 4.
Curley, Edwin (1973), "Experience in Spinoza's Theory of Knowledge",
in Marjorie Grene (ed.), Spinoza: A
Collection of Critical Essays. Garden City, New Jersey: Doubleday, pp.
25-59.
* * *
Tenslotte voeg ik het PDF toe naar
ALAN GABBEY, "Spinoza's natural science and methodology;" Chapter 4 in: Don Garrett (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, 1995 [PDF]
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