Logicus en filosoof Joel I. Friedman schreef veel over #Spinoza

Joel I. Friedman -still uit video zie eind van 't blog

Joel I. Friedman is Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, University of California, Davis - UC Davis [cf.]. Er is van hem geen pagina met informatie te vinden. Wel had Justin Weinberg vijf jaar terug op een webpagina enige informatie over Joel Friedman, die hij o.a. van hemzelf had. Het ging Weinberg om het schema waarin Friedman de geschiedenis samenvatte van de laatste honderd jaar van ontwikkelingen in de wiskundige logica en fundering ervan: “Mathematical Logic and Foundations, 1847-1947.”

Joel Friedman liet aan Justin Weinberg weten:
I finished my doctoral dissertation at UCLA in 1966, in logic and foundations of set theory, providing a new theory, called STC (“the set theory of proper classes”), which turned out to be stronger than the von Neumann/Bernays/Goedel theory of sets and proper classes.  (For example, Tarski’s Axiom of Strongly Inaccessible Cardinals can be derived in my STC.)  My doctoral supervisor was the prominent logician and philosopher of mathematics, Abraham Robinson. He was a real prince of a man, as well as a great mathematical logician. From 1966 to 1971, logic and foundations was my exclusive field of research, and I was hired at UC Davis in 1967 to teach various courses in this area. After 1971, I branched out into other areas of philosophy, over the decades, primarily philosophy of mathematics and science, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and early modern philosophy (Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz). Over the last 15 years, during my retirement, I have focused my research primarily in modal logic and philosophy of mathematics and science, developing a new philosophy called Modal Platonism (MP), first begun when I was a Visiting Fellow at Princeton University (1998-99), working with Bas van Fraassen. I can tell you this MP project is still thrilling to me. Lately during the last several years, I’ve been consulting about MP, with my old teacher/mentor at UCLA, David Kaplan, who was also on my doctoral committee with Robinson. Altogether van Fraassen, Otávio Bueno, Kaplan, and Bernard Molyneux (a UCD colleague) have been most instrumental in spurring me on to the completion of this project. My latest draft paper is called: “Modal Platonism is a Threat to Platonism”.
Hierna gaat hij door over de opzet en ontwikkeling van zijn “ML chart.”

Works by Joel Friedman: cf. philpapers.org.

Mij gaat het hier uiteraard om zijn opvallend vele werk over Spinoza

● Joel I. Friedman, Some Settheoretical Partition Theorems Suggested by the Structure of Spinoza's God. In: Synthese 27 (1-2) May,1974, pp.199 - 209. [PDF op BookSC]

Amihud Gilead zegt iets over dit artikel in zijn, Necessity and Truthful Fictions.

 

Cf. ook mijn blog van 22-12-2010: “George Boole (1815 - 1864) analyseerde met
Booleaanse logica Spinoza’s Ethica,”, waarin ik weinig heel laat van zijn aanpak.

● Joel I. Friedman, A Formalization of Spinoza's Ethics, Part I, 1975 

● Joel I. Friedman, The Universal Class has a Spinozistic Partitioning. In: Synthese 32 (1976), pp. 403-417 [PDF op BookSC]

● Joel I. Friedman, An Overview of Spinoza's "Ehics". In Synthese, Vol. 37, N^o. 1, [Special: Spinoza in Modern Dress] (Jan., 1978), pp. 67-106 [Publisher Springer] [CF. JSTOR; cf. Slideheaven, cf. PDF op BookSC]. Friedman deelt in een eindnoot mee dat dit artikel deels gebaseerd is op zijn bijdrage een het Tercentenary Spinoza symposium dat in maart 1977 gehouden werd aan zijn University of California, Davis.

Uit dit artikel zomaar twee citaten. Eerst een van p. 72:

Now the objectivist interpretation may be challenged as follows: why didn't Spinoza simply define 'attribute' as 'that which constitutes the essence of substance'? Why did he need to bring in intellect, if attributes do objectively exist independently of intellect? My answer is as follows: something would still have been left out of such a definition, namely, that each attribute is a way or means for the intellect to perceive God's essence. Thus, on my view, an attribute has two main characteristics. First, an attribute is objectively a part of God's essence. For, God is defined as having infinitely many such attributes, and thus, any single attribute is only one among many. Secondly, an attribute is a way or means for any intellect to perceive God's essence. However, any attribute fully expresses God's essence (and thus 'constitutes' God's essence, in some sense of 'constitutes' (a point I owe to Donagan)), though an attribute is only a part of that essence and only one among many ways for any intellect to perceive that essence. According to my interpretation of Spinoza, it is logically impossible for any intellect, including God's intellect, to perceive God's essence wholly bare, shorn of all attributes. Rather, any intellect perceives God's essence through some attribute or other. In the case of God, He perceives His own essence through infinitely many attributes, simultaneously. Thus God has infinitely multiple perception.

Ik merk hiertegen op: attributen zijn geen “deel” van Gods essentie, want die is ondeelbaar.

Een citaat van p. 79:

Throughout Spinoza's system, a great deal of theological language is used,but in spite of this, it should be emphasized that God, the maximal substance,is not a person, but Nature itself. God is Nature. Consequently, God actsaccording to the laws of Nature, which are identical with the laws of hisnature or essence. Moreover, God's mind is nothing like a human mind.Spinoza was against any anthropomorphic conception of God. Indeed, hedevotes most of the Appendix to Part I attacking anthropomorphism. Inbrief, he holds that we should not project onto Nature or God such humanqualities as "good and evil, merit and sin, praise and blame, order anddisorder, beauty and deformity, and so forth". Of course, Spinoza is open to the charge of atheism, or mysticism, but in my view, these are all rather loose charges. My own view is that Spinoza blurred the borderline between atheism and theism and that he rationalized mysticism, both magnificent achievements.

Friedman maakte in 1978 ook dit schema van het 1e deel van de Ethica [te vinden op de al genoemde website van Justin Weinberg]

● Joel I. Friedman, 'Spinoza's Denial of Free Will. In Jon Wetlesen (ed.), Spinoza's Philosophy of Man: Proceedings of the Scandinavian Spinoza Symposium, 1977 [Aarhus, 9th to 11th May 1977]. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1978, pp. 51-84.

● Joel I. Friedman, The Mystic's Ontological Argument. In: American Philosophica Quarterly, Vol. 16, N^o 1, January 1979, pp. 73-78 [cf. hier en cf. PDF op BookSC].

● Joel I. Friedman, Necessity and the Ontological Argument. In: Erkenntnis (1975-), Vol. 15, No. 3 (Nov., 1980), pp. 301-331 [cf. jstor; cf. tekst op slideheaven; cf. PDF op BookSC]Vol. 16, No. 1 (Jan., 1979), pp. 73-78

● Joel I. Friedman, Was Spinoza Fooled by the Ontological Argument? In: Philosophia, philosophical quarterly of Israel, Vol. 11 N^o. 3-4 (1981), pp. 307–344. [Springer; PDF op BookSC]

Review by Jonathan Bennett & Peter van Inwagen. In: The Journal of Symbolic Logic, Vol. 49, No. 3. (Sep., 1984), pp. 997-998. [cf. PDF op de website van Andrew M. Bailey; PDF op BookSC]

Jonathan Bennett heeft in A Study of Spinoza's Ethics (1984)  enige verwijzingen naar Friedman [cf. books.google]

● Joel I. Friedman, Spinoza's problem of “other minds”. In: Synthese, Vol. 57, October 1983 [cf. PDF op BookSC]

● Joel I. Friedman, How the Finite Follows from the Infinite in Spinoza's Metaphysical System. In: Synthèse Vol. 69, 3 (1986), 371-407 [cf. PDF op BookSC]

● Joel I. Friedman, The Natural God: A God Even an Atheist Can Believe In. In: Zygon 21 (3) 1986, pp. 369-388.

In this paper, I attempt to dissolve the theism/atheism boundary. In the first part, I consider last things, according to mainstream science. In the second part, I define the Natural God as the Force of Nature—evolving, unifying, maximizing—and consider Its relation to last things. Finally, I discuss our knowledge of the Natural God and Its relevance to our personal lives. I argue that we can know the Natural God through scientific reason combined with global intuition, and that this knowledge, (...) [Cf.] 

Joel I. Friedman 12/6/2005 geïnterviewd door William H. Bossart (klik op foto)