Abraham Wolf (1876 -1948) en zijn studie van #Spinoza [een aanvulling]

Een week geleden e-mailde Cis van Heertum mij: "Ik kwam vanmiddag jouw mooie post over Abraham Wolf tegen"... de rest van de mail pm.

Dat werd voor mij aanleiding mijn blog van 13-10-2009: “Abraham Wolf (1876 -1948) en zijn grote Spinozabibliotheek” weer eens te lezen. Inderdaad een fraai en informatief blog. Verder zoekend, zag ik dat er in de tien jaar sindsdien wel nog e.e.a. op internet is gebracht – aanleiding voor dit aanvullend blog.

In het begin en aan het eind zal ik e.e.a. citeren uit

Jacob Haberman, “Abraham Wolf: A Forgotten Jewish Reform Thinker.” In: The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. 81, No. 3/4 (Jan. - Apr., 1991), pp. 267-304

ABSTRACT: Professor Abraham Wolf; known to scholarship as a historian of ideas and of science, was brought up as an observant Jew and began his career as a Reform rabbi in Manchester, England, in the first decade of this century. Wolfs Reform Judaism was, however, an uneasy compromise between his orthodox background and his rationalist inclinations. In the pulpit he was a recognized apologist for Reform theory and practice. He also wrote articles and reviewed contemporary works on theology and literary scholarship in the Jewish Quarterly Review. Wol was a disciple of Spinoza, a Jew generally regarded as a Western rationalist philosopher. He attempted to resolve his identity crisis (Jew on the one hand, philosopher and intellectual on the other) by a syncretic approach to religion, but the syncretism failed, in part because Judaism could not be reconciled with contemporary Christianity, in part because Judaism itsel was at war over the split between Orthodoxy and Reform. Eventually Wolfgave up his pulpit and devoted himselfentirely to secular teaching and writing. This article surveys Wof's early work and identifies themes which continued to be important during his later scholarly career. It includes, as an appendix, a bibliography of Wolf's publications during his Manchester period.

Born in Russia to a shopkeeper in 1876, Wolf was brought to England by his parents as a child to settle in London, where he received his education. While attending Jews' College, a seminary for the training of Jewish ministers, he also studied at London University, graduating with honors at both institutions in Semitic studies as well as in mental and moral philosophy. At Jews' College he was also the recipient of the coveted Jewish "Cambridge" Scholarship, enabling him to attend St. John's College, where he received his doctorate for a dissertation entitled The Existential Import of Categorical Predication: Studies in Logic, which was published by Cambridge University Press in 1905.

During the period of his active rabbinate in Manchester he produced a series of essays and book reviews which addressed matters of Jewish intellectual history and the theory and practice of Reform Judaism. Most of these pieces appeared first in the Jewish Quarterly Review and display his remarkable integrity, intellectual distinction, graceful style, and dry wit. Above all, even when he disagreed with the views of the writers under discussion, he was never cantankerous nor did he engage in ad hominem arguments. Every opposing view was presented with scrupulous fairness; he never allowed personal differences to interfere with his objective arguments.

What gives these essays and reviews continuing interest is Wolf's struggle to achieve a synthesis between the scientific rationalism which he derived from thinkers like Maimonides and Spinoza, on the one hand, and Jewish religious practice, derived from his upbringing and formative studies at the Seminary, on the other.

That so eminent a thinker and man of letters should be forgotten is unfortunate. This article analyzes some of his significant ideas and how they relate to his background. In the appendix to this essay will be found an annotated bibliography of Wolf's writings on Jewish themes. [p. 268-269]

[..]

[H]e delivered an address at a meeting of the Aristotelian Society in London on February 21, 1927, to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Spinoza's death.[23] In it Wolf compares the philosophies of Spinoza and Descartes, arguing that the latter conceived nature as essentially inert. Hence Descartes was forced to invoke a deus ex machina, not only to create matter and to maintain it in existence by incessant recreation, but also to impart motion and rest to it, and to keep this motion and rest constant in quantity. "The Cartesian philosophy," Wolf continues, "not only treats God like an outsider but works Him terribly hard in keeping this sorry scheme of things together." He adds:

Essentially the Cartesian philosophy is like any of the familiar cosmogonies of the historic theologies, and is addicted to inces- sant miracles. As a philosophy, Spinozism is, in my opinion, incomparably superior to Cartesianism. To Spinoza, the inces-sant cosmic wire-pulling by an external God did not appear to conform to the rules of the game.... Spinoza endeavored to conceive the universe as a self-sufficient, autonomous, and per-fectly rational system, free from external interference, and free from arbitrariness and caprice.... Unless I am very much mis-taken, the philosophy of Spinoza is more in harmony with present day scientific thought, to say nothing of social and political thought, than any philosophy since his time.[24]

In the Introduction to his edition of The Correspondence of Spinoza, Wolf elaborates on this critique:

Descartes' summons to universal doubt was a flourish rather than a serious call to arms. It is almost pathetic to witness how easily his doubts were satisfied. It is almost comical to see how he strains at a gnat and swallows a camel; how he declines to believe in the reality of observed objects, yet readily accepts the reality of a supernatural Deity whom he promptly burdens with the responsibility for all Cartesian beliefs and fancies. No Church dignitary ever exploited God as a very ready help in time of trouble more than Descartes did. If his scientific en-deavors require the existence of bodies or of souls, he makes God create them out of nothing. If the bodies need motion and rest to account for their appearances, he makes God endow them with motion and rest. If he finds it convenient to assume the constancy or conservation of motion and rest, he makes God constant or consistent in His relation to motion and rest; and so on. For Descartes the phenomena of Nature are essen-tially miraculous-that is, the result of the incessant interference of a supernatural Deity.... His ultimate philosophic orientation is essentially the same as that of the miracle-mongering Church.[25]

[…]

Small wonder, therefore, that after the first decade of this cen-tury Wolf produced no additional scholarly work on Jewish themes except his address on Spinoza in the Liberal Jewish Synagogue of London, in 1932, whose content was completely secular in tone and direction; and his essay on the "Rationalism of Maimonides." Other than these two essays, a sketchy article outlining "The Jewish Contribution to Philosophy in Germany" in 1933, and an occasional review in the Jewish Guardian, Wolf wrote nothing substantive on Jewish themes again.

Inevitably then, he gradually moved into academe, having al-ready entered its halls as an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of London in 1906, while still in the active rabbinate. Spinoza became his "mentor" as well as the bridge over which he crossed from Jewish to secular scholarship. Although Spinoza surely was his academic hero-Wolf had originally planned to write his dissertation on him, but at the suggestion of his instruc-tors abandoned that idea-it was Jacob Freudenthal, a historian of philosophy in the Jewish Theological Seminary at Breslau as well as in the University of Breslau, who may have served as Wolf's possible role model. Incidentally, Freudenthal left the Breslau Seminary on receiving his full professorship at the University, abandoning in part some of his previous associations and interests in Jewish matters. [29 voetnoot pm]

De titels van zijn werken citeer ik uit en.wikisource over Abraham Wol dat in 2015 ontstond:

Works

• The existential import of categorical predication; studies in logic. Cambridge, University Press, 1905.
• The philosophy of Nietzsche. London, Constable & Co., 1915.
• Exercises in logic and scientific method. London, G. Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1919.
• Spinoza and time. London, [1921]
• Spinoza, the conciliator. Hagae Comitis [Societas Spinozana] 1922.
• Essentials of scientific method. London, G. Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1925.
• Essentials of logic. London, G. Allen & Unwin [1926]
• Huxley and Spinoza. Hagae Comitis [Societas Spinozana] 1926.
• Spinoza. Journal of philosophical studies. v. 2, no. 5. Publisher: [London] Macmillan [1927]
• Textbook of logic. New York, Macmillan Co., 1930.
• A history of science, technology and philosophy in the 16 th. and 17 th. centuries. London : Allen et Unwin, 1935.
• Higher education in Nazi Germany; or, Education for world-conquest. London, Methuen & Co. [1944]
• Spinoza (1632-1677): the library of the late Prof. Dr. A. Wolf, head of the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science, University of London. Amsterdam: Internationaal Antiquariaat (Menno Hertzberger), [1950]
• A history of science, technology, & philosophy in the 18th century. Vol. 1 by A. Wolf; D. McKie. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961.
• A history of science, technology, and philosophy in the eighteenth century. Vol. 2. London: Allen & Unwin, 1962.

·         A history of science, technology, and philosophy in the 16th & 17th centuries, by A. Wolf; Friedrich Dannemann; A. Armitage. New York: Harper, 1959 (new editions until 1999)

As translator

• Spinoza's short treatise on God, man & his well-being. London (1910), New York (1963). (start transcription)
• The oldest biography of Spinoza. London, Allen and Unwin 1927.

Hieraan voeg ik het volgende toe uit de Appendix van het bovenvermelde artikel van Jacob Haberman: Annotated Bibliography of Jewish Studies by Abraham Wolf

A. Essays

7. "Spinoza," The Liberal Jewish Monthly 4 (1933): 61-62.
This is a summary of an address given in the Liberal Jewish Synagogue on Sunday, November 27, 1932. Wolf remarks that to Spinoza belonged the great tradition of the Hebrew prophets. Though he was indebted to many preceding Jewish thinkers, that did not detract from his great originality. In the body of the lecture Wolf "recycles" what he said in item 11, which in turn is heavily dependent on Freudenthal.

B. Book Reviews

10. "Professor Freudenthal's Spinoza," JQR o.s. 11 (1899): 490- 495.
Wolf's analytic ability is already evident in this review, one of his earliest writings. The historian Graetz had argued that Spinoza was born in Spain because Spinoza referred in his correspondence to a Jewish martyrdom which took place there in 1644. Referring to the martyr known as Judah the Believer, Spinoza used the phrase ipse. .. novi, "I was acquainted with," from which Graetz plausibly inferred that Spinoza personally knew the martyr who never left Spain. Freudenthal presented convincing documentary evidence showing that Spinoza was born in Amsterdam. Wolf remarks: "In reply to Graetz's contention that 'a mathematically exact writer' [i.e., Spinoza] would not have said ipse... novi if he had not been an eye-witness, I might venture to suggest that 'a mathematically exact writer' would probably have used ipse .. . vidi if he had been there."

11. "Prof. J. Freudenthal's Life of Spinoza," JQR o.s. 17 (1905): 390-396.
This biography is highly praised as a first-rate work; the second volume, on his philosophy, unfortunately never appeared.

26. "Prof. Alexander's Space, Time, and Deity," Jewish Guardian 2 (Oct. 29, 1920): 6.
Wolf praises this book very highly and pronounces the system of metaphysics of Samuel Alexander as one of the most important and original ones since Spinoza's days. In his judgment this work is the most important contribution by far to philosophy that has been made by an English speaking Jew; and one of the most important ever made by any Jew. He predicts that in the future the name of Alexander will rank with those of Spinoza, Mendelssohn, and Bergson-a goodly company of whom Jews may well be proud.

---

[23] A. Wolf, "Spinoza's Conception of the Attributes of Substance," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, n.s., 27 (1927): 177-192, as reprinted in S. Paul Kashap, ed., Studies in Spinoza: Critical and Interpretive Essays (Berkeley and London, 1972), pp. 16-27. [Deze tekst haal ik onder naarbinnen] 

[24] Wolf, in Kashap, Studies, pp. 22, 27. Philosophically minded scientists have, however, found that the latest developments in physics are more easily reconcilable with Kant's metaphysics than with the metaphysics of any other philosopher

[25] The Correspondence of Spinoza, trans. and ed. by A. Wolf (New York, 1928), pp. 25f. The anti-theological bias in Wolf's assessment of Descartes versus Spinoza is readily apparent, and it is surprising that Wolf did not realize how vulnerable his position was and how easily the tables could be turned on him and his hero Spinoza. One might argue as follows: It is almost pathetic to witness a thinker with such keen analytic powers and depth of penetration as Wolf swallowing the Spinozist system hook, line, and sinker. It is almost comical to observe how Spinoza in the first part of his Ethics seeks to demonstrate in more geometrico (i.e. in the manner of Euclid's geometry) the proposition that the universe is a single all-embracing unity, which is God (or Nature). The first, third, and sixth of Spinoza's definitions already contain the two assumptions that God and substance are synonymous and self-caused (which is defined, def. 1, as "that of which the nature is only conceivable as existent"), that is, that they exist. "By substance," Spinoza says (def. 3), "I mean that which is in itself and is conceived through itself: in other words, that of which a conception can be formed independently of any other conception." The important part of this definition is contained in the expres- sion "conceived through itself," for it is on the basis of this expression that he "proves" that substance must be unlimited and uncaused, since if it were limited or caused by something it could not be independent and "conceived through itself." "In other words," as Stuart Hampshire says, "He has so strictly defined substance that nothing whose attributes are the effects of outside causes can be called a substance" (Stuart Hampshire, Spinoza, rev. ed. [New York, 1987], p. 41). Spinoza then gives another definition (6), this time of God as "a being absolutely infinite." Since he has already established to his own satisfaction that there can be only one independent substance, Spinoza concludes that substance is God. Now granted that if substance is arbitrarily defined as "all that there is," it is, of course, the case that it must exist, that it must be "conceived through itself," and that it must be all- inclusive. Even if the arguments were freer than they are from formal logical fallacy, such a conclusion is not worth proving. What Spinoza has failed to establish is that "all there is" has a certain character, that it is in fact a unity, and that this unity is God. Spinoza's long petitio, successful in proving a tautology, is very far from establi[…]shing this further proposition.