Spinoza: Philosophical Context

François Lamy, a Benedictine monk and Cartesian philosopher whose extensive relations with Arnauld, Bossuet, Fénélon, and Malebranche put him into contact with the intellectual elite of late-seventeenth-century France, authored the very first detailed and explicit refutation of Spinoza’s Ethics in French, Le nouvel athéisme renversé. Regrettably overlooked in the secondary literature on Spinoza, Lamy is an interesting figure in his own right, and his anti-Spinozist work sheds important light on Cartesian assumptions that inform the earliest phase of Spinoza’s critical reception (...) in the seventeenth-century. I begin by presenting Lamy’s life and the contentious state of Spinoza’s French reception in the 1680 and 1690s. I then discuss a central argument in Lamy’s refutation, namely the Cartesian objection that Spinoza’s account of the conceptual independence of attributes is incompatible with the theory of substance monism. Contrasting Lamy’s objection with questions put to Spinoza by de Vries and Tschirnhaus, I maintain that by exhibiting the direction Spinoza’s views on substance and attribute took in maturing we may accurately assess the strength of Spinoza’s position vis-à-vis his Cartesian objector, and I argue that, in fact, Spinoza’s mature account of God as an expressive ens realissimum is not vulnerable to Lamy’s criticism. In conclusion, I turn to Lamy’s objection that Spinoza’s philosophy is question-begging in view of Spinoza’s account of God, and I exhibit what this point of criticism tells us about the intentions of the first French Cartesian rebuttal of the Ethics. (shrink)

_ Spinoza and Dutch Cartesianism: Philosophy and Theology _, by DouglasAlexander X.. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. viii + 184.

Radical Enlightenment – Spinoza’s Demiurgic Role in the Formation of the Idea of Enlightenment? In his monograph devoted to the history of enlightenment, Radical Enlightenment. Philosophy and the Making of Modernity (1650-1750) British historian Jonathan Irvine Israel formulated a new theory of dating, sources, and the nature of this period of history. Israel attributed a major role in the formation of the concepts of enlightenment to the philosophy of Spinoza (1632-1677). The work has caused a series of controversies and criticisms (...) concerning the assessment of facts related to the history of ideas. In this article I refer to interpretations of the role of Spinoza’s philosophy and its early reception between 1663-1678 when it had a direct influence. The political situation in the Netherlands in the period of 1648-1677 (i.e. from the gaining of independence to the death of Spinoza) and the fate of the philosophy of Descartes (since 1650) are two significant factors that played an important role in shaping the initial reception of Spinozism and determined the fate of that philosophy for a long time. (shrink)

For many years, philosophers and other scholars have commented on the remarkable similarity between Spinoza and the Stoics, with some even going so far as to speak of 'Spinoza the Stoic'. Until now, however, no one has systematically examined the relationship between the two systems. In Spinoza and the Stoics Jon Miller takes on this task, showing how key elements of Spinoza's metaphysics, epistemology, philosophical psychology, and ethics relate to their Stoic counterparts. Drawing on a wide-range of secondary literature including (...) the most up-to-date scholarship and a close examination of the textual evidence, Jon Miller not only reveals the sense in which Spinoza was, and was not, a Stoic, but also offers new insights into how each system should be understood in itself. His book will be of great interest to scholars and students of ancient philosophy, early modern philosophy, Spinoza, and the philosophy of the Stoics. (shrink)

In proposition 7 of the second part of the Ethics, Spinoza famously contends that the “order and connection of things is the same as the order and connection of ideas.” On this basis, Spinoza argues in the scholium that thought and extension are different ways of conceiving one and the same substance: “the thinking substance and the extended substance are one and the same substance, which is now comprehended under this attribute, now under that”. Less famously, in the same scholium, (...) Spinoza insists that the relation of thought and extension is not the only issue at stake. He notes that “certain Hebrews” saw, “as if through a cloud,” the unity of God and the world in knowing: “they maintained that God, God’s intellect, and the things understood by him are one and the same.” The cloud is the idea of divine transcendence. Commenting on this passage, Aviezer Ravitzky has observed that Spinoza’s mention of these “certain Hebrews” should inform us about “an inherent problem, about dynamite concealed in the teachings of the Jewish Aristotelians such as Maimonides.” If, as Aristotle argues in the De Anima and Metaphysics, the knower and the known are one in knowing, then the distinction between God and the objects of God’s knowing is undermined. Noetic union is ontological union, for the intellect is its ideas. Thus Aristotelian noesis undermines divine transcendence. E2p7 and its scholium, then, presage the most famous—or infamous—expression of the Ethics, Deus sive Natura. Maimonides qualifies his Aristotelianism with an hierarchical emanationist cosmology, thereby avoiding the implications of noetic union by differentiating between the creator and the creatures and between the agent intellect, the lowest of the celestial spheres and source of the human acquired intellect, and the divine intellect. Gersonides, the fourteenth century giant of the medieval Jewish tradition and its most consistent Aristotelian, endorses the Aristotelian formula, arguing consistently that the intelligible is an intellect and offering a meticulous explanation of “why it is said of non-material things that the intellect, the thinker, and the intelligible are all one.” In this article, I argue that Gersonides’ own highly Averroian position is evoked in E2p7s and that Spinoza extends and radicalizes the Gersonidean inheritance. Beginning from E2p7 and its scholium, I explore the implications of noetic union for the relationship of God and the world and that between thought and extension. (shrink)

This ambitious study presents Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) as the most outstanding and influential thinker of modernity--and examines the question of whether he was the "first secular Jew." A number-one bestseller in Israel, Spinoza and Other Heretics is made up of two volumes--The Marrano of Reason and The Adventures of Immanence offered as a set and also separately. Yirmiyahu Yovel, Professor of Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, shows how Spinoza grounded a philosophical revolution in a radically new principle--the philosophy (...) of immanence, or the idea that this world is all there is--and how he thereby anticipated secularization, the Enlightenment, the disintegration of ghetto life, and the rise of natural science and the liberal-democratic state. The Marrano of Reason The Marrano of Reason finds the origins of the idea of immanence in the culture of Spinoza's Marrano ancestors, Jews in Spain and Portugal who had been forcibly converted to Christianity. Yovel uses their fascinating story to show how the crypto-Jewish life they maintained in the face of the Inquisition mixed Judaism and Christianity in ways that undermined both religions and led to rational skepticism and secularism. He identifies Marrano patterns that recur in Spinoza in a secularized context: a "this-worldly" disposition, a split religious identity, an opposition between inner and outer life, a quest for salvation outside official doctrines, and a gift for dual language and equivocation. This same background explains the drama of the young Spinoza's excommunication from the Jewish community in his native Amsterdam. Convention portrays the Amsterdam Jews as narrow-minded and fanatical, but in Yovel's vivid account they emerge as highly civilized former Marranos with cosmopolitan leanings, struggling to renew their Jewish identity and to build a "new Jerusalem" in the Netherlands. (shrink)

In This Paper I Aim to Place Spinoza’s famous injunction in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, to separate philosophy from theology, in its historical context. I contend that in order to properly understand Spinoza’s views concerning the relationship between philosophy and theology, we must view his work in the context of philosophical discussions taking place during his time and in his country of residence, the Dutch Republic. Of particular relevance is a meta-philosophical thesis advocated by a certain group of Cartesian philosophers and (...) theologians. Their thesis was developed in response to attacks on Cartesianism from more conservative authors, who saw it as a source of impiety. It stated that Cartesian .. (shrink)

Warren Montag’s book is a fine analysis of the ways in which Spinoza’s materialism, as it was formulated in The Ethics, affects his political theory. Even though Montag’s analysis is historical, and sensitive to the theoretical and political context of Spinoza’s thinking, it also takes decisively into account contemporary political theories and so works to frame the context within which Montag himself thinks. Constantly referring to Louis Althusser’s remarks about the connection between Spinoza’s philosophy and the former’s theory of ideology, (...) as well as to Antonio Negri’s, Etienne Balibar’s, and Pierre Macherey’s readings of Spinoza, Montag formulates the core problem of his analysis by means of the following theses: “There can be no liberation of the mind without a liberation of the body”; and “There can be no liberation of the individual without collective liberation”. (shrink)

In the first volume of his Spinoza and Other Heretics entitled The Marrano of Reason, Yovel proposes a different cultural context for the study of Spinoza: the Marrano mentalité. Living as crypto?Jews in a Catholic Iberian world, the Marranos developed a certain life?style that had specific religious and literary modes of expression: heterodox tendencies, the use of equivocation, and the zealous search for salvation, which often assumed secular forms. These Marrano traits are, Yovel claims, found in Spinoza as well, who (...) was the son of a Marrano and brought up in the Marrano milieu of the Amsterdam Jewish quarter. In this essay I challenge this interpretation of Spinoza by stressing both the generally orthodox character of Marrano religiosity and the significant differences between Spinoza and the few Marrano heretics by whom he was supposedly influenced. I argue that Spinoza not only rejected Marrano orthodoxy but was already inhabiting an intellectual framework that differed considerably from the marginal deviant Marrano pattern that Yovel focuses upon. (shrink)