Yitzhak Melamed gaat het weer hebben over #Spinoza’s ‘Atheism’

De Washington Spinoza Society (de kring rond Daniel Spiro, cf. ) begint z'n nieuwe seizoen op maandag 9 september 2019 met een lezing van Yitzhak Melamed  over “Spinoza’s ‘Atheism’”. Hij zal "show that the only sense in which Spinoza can be genuinely considered an atheist is one that is not particularly informative." 'Atheism' dus tussen aanhalingstekens. [Cf.]
Y. Melamed sprak ook over “Spinoza’s ‘Atheism’” tijdens de conferentie die van 5-7 mei 2017 aan Princeton werd gehouden over: SPINOZA: REASON, RELIGION AND POLITICS [Cf.]. Dat wordt volgens zijn mededeling op academia.edu een hoofdstuk in het komende boek Daniel Garber (ed.), Spinoza: Reason, Religion, Politics: The Relation Between the Ethics and the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Melamed's Abstract:
The impermanence of human affairs is a major theme in Spinoza’s discussions of political histories,  and from our present-day perspective it is both intriguing and ironic to see how this very theme has played out in the evolving fate of Spinoza’s association with atheism. While Spinoza’s contemporaries charged him with atheism in order to impugn his philosophy (and sometimes his character), in our times many lay readers and some scholars portray Spinoza as an atheist in order to commemorate his role as a founder of modern secularism. In this paper, I will argue that Spinoza deserves neither vilification nor praise for being an atheist, for the simple reason that he was not one.
 I will proceed in the following manner. In the first part of this paper, I will present and raise some preliminary questions about Steven Nadler’s argument that Spinoza was an atheist. I shall concentrate on Nadler’s arguments in particular because I take him to be the most eloquent and proficient advocate of the atheist reading of Spinoza. In the second and third parts, I will discuss a small selection of key texts from the Ethics and the TTP, respectively, and argue that the atheist reading fails to make sense of these key passages. Let me stress that this selection of passages is far from comprehensive, and that dozens of other passages can be adduced to establish the very same point. I hope by the end of the third part to have demonstrated the falsity of the atheist reading. In my conclusion I will attempt to point out that Spinoza’s pantheism (or panentheism ) and his critique of anthropomorphic religion and anthropomorphic conceptions of providence fall well within the purview of legitimate – though not uncontroversial – rabbinic views on these issues.