#Spinoza als wetenschapper

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

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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.

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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]