John Carriero - Descartes en #Spinoza scholar [2]

In het vorige blog gaf ik naast algemene informatie de boeken die John Carriero schreef of co-editeerde over Descartes. Hier geef ik een overzicht, mét zoveel mogelijk nadere informatie, over hetgeen hij over Spinoza schreef.

Carriero’s artikelen en hoofdstukken over Spinoza’s filosofie

1.      “Spinoza’s Views on Necessity in Historical Perspective,” Philosophical Topics, 19 (1991), pp. 47-96.

Waarin hij een diepgaande discussie geeft over Spinoza's relatie tot de scholastiek.

Aldus J. Martin Bac in Perfect Will Theology: Divine Agency in Reformed Scholasticism as against Suárez, Episcopius, Descartes, and Spinoza. BRILL, 2010, op p. 263, noot 13

2.     “On the Theological Roots of Spinoza’s Argument for Monism,” Faith and Philosophy, 11 (1994), pp. 626-644 [Cf.].

In tegenstelling tot Gueroult volgens wie de attributen eenvoudige substanties zijn, en God een complexe substantie is die uit bestaat uit (is samengesteld uit) simpele substanties, benadrukt Carriero de simpliciteit van de Spinozistische God, die dus geen samengestelde substantie is. Hij betoogt dit vanuit de brieven en op basis van Ethica 1/12 en vooral 1/13 (Substantia absolute infinita est indivisibilis.).

Cf. J. Martin Bac, Perfect Will Theology: Divine Agency in Reformed Scholasticism as against Suárez, Episcopius, Descartes, and Spinoza. BRILL, 2010. Vanaf p. 380 gaat Bac in op dit artikel, cf. books.google. Ook Edamura Shohei [van de Kyoto University], “Discussions of 1P5 in Spinoza’s Ethics” [PDF] gaat uitgebreid op dit artikel van Carriero in.

3.     “On the Relationship Between Mode and Substance in Spinoza’s Metaphysics,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 33 (1995), pp. 245-273.

In dit artikel bestrijdt hij de benadering van Edwin Curley. Of Curley hier op zijn beurt weer tegenin is gegaan weet ik niet. Curley gaat in zijn “Spinoza's Metaphysics Revisited,” [in: Jack Stetter & Charles Ramond (eds.), Spinoza in Twenty-First Century American and French Philosophy. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019], niet rechtstreeks in op dit artikel, maar zegt alleen dat Melamed, zijn target, zich op o.a. Carriero baseert.
Zie de verschillende benaderingen toegelicht door Samuel Newlands in zijn lemma  "Spinoza’s Modal Metaphysics;" in de Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

4.     Monism in Spinoza,” Chapter 2 in: John Biro and Olli Koistinen (eds.), Spinoza: Metaphysical Themes ( Press, 2002), pp. 38-59.

Matthew David Wion, Spinoza on Individuals and Individuation: Metaphysics, Morals, and Politics. PhD Dissertation, Marquette University [Paper 145], 2011. [Cf.& PDF] gaat uitgebreid in op dit hoofdstuk en maakt er gebruik van.

Om een idee te geven over waarover dit hoofdstuk gaat hier de eerste pagina:

De redacteuren schrijven in de inleiding:

John Carriero distinguishes between individuation-oriented and substance-oriented interpretations of Spinoza's argument for monism. In individuation-oriented interpretations, as in those of Bennett and Curley, monism is thought somehow to follow from certain assumptions about the nature of identity. In substance-oriented interpretations, as in those of Donagan and Wolfson, monism is somehow built into the definition of substance. Substance is something that is absolutely independent of everything else. But, of course, there can be only one such thing, God. Carriero presents still another account, drawing on the correspondence between Spinoza and Henry Oldenburg. On this interpretation, Spinoza's monism about extended substance grows out of, indeed, is a natural development of, Descartes's conception of matter.

Oxford Scolarship Online geeft de volgende aanduiding:
This essay explores Spinoza’s attitude towards the ontological status of finite corporeal things, i.e., finite bodies or, in the Cartesian context in which he is working, finite regions of res extensa. It argues that Spinoza’s monism, especially as it bears on the ontological status of finite bodies, should be understood as a response to revisions in the concept of matter wrought by Descartes’s science. The early exchange of letters between Henry Oldenburg and Spinoza is examined to defend this argument.

5.     “Spinoza on Final Causality,” in: Daniel Garber and Steven Nadler (eds.), Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2005), vol. 2, pp. 105-147.

Carriero behandelt o.a. “the complex issue of whether Aristotelians are in general, or in specific instances, committed to there being a necessary connection between efficient causation and final causation, and, if so, to what sort of final causation.” [Aldus omschrijft Jeffrey K. McDonough het thema in zijn "The Heyday of Teleology and Early Modern Philosophy" in John Carriero, ed. Early Modern Philosophy Reconsidered, Midwest Studies in Philosophy (35) 2011: 179-204 [cf. PDF]

Dit lange en fundamentele artikel is te lezen in het PDF van het boek dat te vinden is op BookSC.

6.     “Conatus and Perfection in Spinoza,” in: John Carriero (guest ed.), Early Modern Philosophy Reconsidered: Essays in Honor of Paul Hoffman, a special issue of Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 35 (2011), pp. 69-92

7.     “The Ethics in Spinoza’s Ethics,” in: Matthew Kisner and Andrew Youpa (eds.), Essays on Spinoza’s Ethical Theory (Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 20-40

De redacteuren van het boek schrijver over dit hoofdstuk in hun inleiding:

The first essay in this volume, John Carriero’s ‘The Ethics in Spinoza’s Ethics’, casts light on this issue [that Spinoza aims to defend a kind of morality, versus that he aims to debunk morality as resting on falsehoods] by highlighting ways that Spinoza both follows and departs from mainstream traditions of ethical theorizing and, in particular, from Aristotelianism as it was developed by medieval scholastics. In the middle books of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle’s account of human flourishing consists in the realization of our powers for action and in engagement with others through the development of virtues like friendship and justice, whereas Book X maintains that our flourishing consists in contemplation, disengaged from others and from the needs of the community. The Book X doctrine was taken up in the medieval Aristotelian idea that we attain blessedness through contemplation of God, our best though imperfect understanding of God.

Carriero argues that Spinoza follows this tradition in the sense that the Ethics similarly follows two tracks: the middle sections of the Ethics—Parts 3 and 4—offer an account of human flourishing as consisting in realizing our powers by acting in accordance with reason’s dictates and managing our affects, whereas Part 5 focuses on the flourishing that comes from intuitive knowledge of God.

Carriero also makes evident some ways that Spinoza breaks from this tradition. The emergence of scientific and philosophical mechanism, according to Carriero, posed a problem for reconciling the bodily aspect of human beings, governed by physical principles, and the mental aspect, governed by rational principles. How can these different aspects come together into a unified human being? Carriero argues that Spinoza addresses this difficulty by identifying the corporeal order and structure of the universe with its cognitive structure and order. This is the famous parallelism doctrine, which identifies minds and bodies as identical things expressed under the attributes of thought and extension. This solution leads Spinoza to reject the view that the human will stands outside of the physical order, as if it could act on that order without at the same time being part of it. In doing so, Spinoza also rejects the notion of an absolutely free will, i.e., a will that is cut off from the rest of the universe and free to act independently of the causal order. Spinoza therefore breaks with a major tradition in the history of ethics by denying that humans are agents in the sense of being endowed with free wills and possessing absolute power over their actions. In this way Carriero draws attention to a central reason for regarding Spinoza as engaged in the project of debunking morality.

8.     “Spinoza, the Will, and the Ontology of Power,” in: Yitzhak Melamed (ed.), The Young Spinoza (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 160-182

Redacteur Melamed in de inleiding over dit hoofdstuk:

Chapter 10 by John Carriero focuses on chapter 16 of part 2 of the KV. His contribution scrutinizes Spinoza’s odd notion that the will is not a “real thing” but rather a “being of reason.” Spinoza develops this claim by comparing the will to a universal. In the first part of the chapter, Carriero contrasts Spinoza’s conception of a (physical) individual as a determination of the universe’s basic geometrical, kinetic, and dynamic invariances with an Aristotelian conception of an individual constituted by various interrelated “perfections” that are capable of two modes of existence, one in the individual and another in the mind. As Carriero argues, Spinoza’s thesis that the will is not a real thing concerns what might be thought of as the ontology of power and cuts more deeply than the themes usually associated with Spinoza on the topic of free will, namely those concerned with freedom, determinism, and the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Spinoza’s fundamental claim concerns what a power (such as the will) is—that is, a certain determination of the universe’s invariances, which implies that the will is not some “compartmentalized” power that we bring to the universe’s causal table.

9.     “The Highest Good and Perfection in Spinoza,” Chapter 12 in: Michael Della Rocca (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Spinoza (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018 - online, 2016), pp. 240-272

Redacteur Della Rocco over dit hoofdstuk van Carriero:

Two of Spinoza's strangest theses—at least to the modern ear—are his view that different individuals can enjoy greater or lesser degrees of reality and that our highest perfection or reality consists in knowledge of God. We are inclined to respond that reality is an on-or-off matter, not something that comes in degrees, and to wonder why, even if there are degrees of reality, they are a function of the extent to which an individual knows God. These theses are not only strange, but are absolutely central to Spinoza's system, and, if we don't understand them, then at a fundamental level, we don't understand Spinoza. In "The Highest Good and Perfection in Spinoza," John Carriero sheds considerable light on these most challenging notions by understanding Spinoza in a historical context that stretches back to Aristotle and Aquinas and forward at least to Leibniz. Aristotle, in book to of the Nicomachean Ethics, grounds our perfection in contemplation of the good, and Aquinas calls this contemplation visio dei —"vision of God." Spinoza adopts versions of these claims. However, Spinoza—with his perhaps greater commitment to the intelligibility of things—allows, and indeed stresses, that we have knowledge of the essence of God, something we can grasp, for Aquinas, only with special help from God. This knowledge of God in Spinoza is the source of our knowledge of particular things each of which follows from God's essence and each of which is what it is because of its place in the network of causes and effects. Extending the contrast with Aristotle and Aquinas, Carriero explains how the activity of things that follow from God's nature is not fundamentally end-directed, but is to be explained by efficient causaion in a plenum in which the whole is ontologically prior to the parts. Throughout the chapter, Carriero puts Spinoza into close engagement with Leibniz: Carriero shows how Spinoza, without compromising on intelligibility, denies that goodness and desirability play the fundamental role that they would later play in Leibniz's philosophy which is, in this respect, in the spirit of Aquinas's and Aristotle's systems. Carriero shows how, for Spinoza, there is a maximally real order that plays much the same role that Leibniz's best of all possible worlds plays, but without the fundamental role to be played by God's will and by teleology.

10.                       “Remarks on Cognition in Spinoza: Understanding, Sensation, and Belief,” in Hemmo Laiho and Arto Repo (eds.), De natura rerum: Scripta in honorem professoris Olli Koistinen sexagesimum annum complentis [Reports from the Department of Philosophy, vol. 38] (Turku, Finland: University of Turku, 2016), pp. 134-147 – te lezen in academia.edu

In this paper, I sketch some of the ways in which Spinoza’s thinking about cognition differs from those prevalent today.

11.                       “Conatus,” in: Yitzhak Melamed (ed.), Cambridge Critical Guide to Spinoza’s “Ethics” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 142-168 [cf. PDF op bookSC]

Redacteur Melamed schrijft in zijn inleiding over dit hoofdstuk:
No complete account of Spinoza’s views on human behavior and volition can leave out an analysis of his famous conatus doctrine, namely, that “each thing, so far as it is in itself, strives to persevere in its being.” According to John Carriero, Spinoza’s introduction of his theory of conatus at the beginning of Part III of the Ethics has puzzled scholars in recent years. Commentators (e.g., Bennett, Della Rocca, and Don Garrett) have found Spinoza’s argument for the conatus doctrine riddled with fallacies and the theory itself open to obvious counterexamples (e.g., burning candles and suicide). Some (e.g., Garrett) have exercised considerable ingenuity in attempting to show that the fallacies are only apparent. Carriero argues, however, that much of the original worry is misplaced. By embedding Spinoza’s theory in the context of his plenum theory, we can see the conatus theory as a large part of his attempt to articulate what counts as a finite real (as opposed to mentally constructed) being in the physical universe. (An important idea here is that a real being must be naturally unified both synchronically and diachronically.) Against this background, Spinoza’s conatus argument flows reasonably smoothly and his claims are not subject to easy counterexamples, which is not to deny that important and interesting substantive issues remain. One issue that emerges is that Spinoza’s conception of a finite real thing or finite mode has (like Leibniz’s later conception of a corporeal substance) a quasi-biological cast that our modern, post-Kantian notion of an object lacks. Carriero carefully positions Spinoza’s thesis that things tend to persevere in their being vis-à-vis the traditional thesis that all things seek the end or good of being, in order to better understand the novelty of Spinoza’s theory of conatus: while Spinoza agrees with the tradition that things tilt toward their being, his analysis of this tendency, which does not ground this tendency in a thing’s being an “end” or a “good” for it, departs significantly from the analysis given by the Aristotelian tradition.

12.                       “Spinoza’s Three Kinds of Cognition: Imagination, Understanding, and Definition and Essence,” Chapter 6 in: Martina Reuter & Frans Svensson (eds.), Mind, Body, and Morality: New Perspectives on Descartes and Spinoza. Routledge, 2019, pp. 98 – 121 [tot p. 109 te lezen in books.google]

Abstract: This chapter was sparked by some remarks made by Lilli Alanen’s “Spinoza on the Human Mind” (Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 35) to the effect that much of what is found at what Spinoza terms the lowest level of cognition—i.e., imagination—is “certain” and “beyond doubt.” Some imaginative cognition would, it seems, count as knowledge in any ordinary sense of the term. How, then, do the two higher forms of cognition, reason and intuition, differ from imagination? They differ in that the two higher forms of cognition involve essence and understanding. This chapter explores Spinoza’s conception of essence and understanding—and through that, his picture of scientia—by reflecting on his plenum physics. Special attention is given to how the logic of what Spinoza calls “common notions,” based on invariance of structure, differs from a more traditional logic of universals, based on general kinds and particulars belonging to those kinds. [cf. taylorfrancis]

13.                       “Spinoza on the Primary Affects,” in Noa Naaman (ed.), Freedom and the Passions in Spinoza’s Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)

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Wat opvalt is a) dat in bijna alle belangrijke boeken over Spinoza uit de Angelsaksische wereld van de laatste tijd hoofdstukken van Carriero te vinden zijn; b) de breedheid van zijn thematiek en c) zoals ik aan het begin al zei, dat hij Spinoza telkens plaatst tegen de achtergrond van de klassieke – vooral Aristotelische - en de eigentijdse filosofie.