BdSpinoza

Mogens Laerke bindt strijd aan met "the PSR movement spearheaded by Della Rocca and Melamed"

Op dit weblog is al veel geblogd en gereageerd over de zgn. “PSR”, Leibniz's principe van voldoende reden, dat Michael Della Rocca zo overheersend – zelfs in ‘dubbele PSR’ - in Spinoza ziet werken. En als dat hier of daar minder duidelijk lijkt, dan verbetert hij Spinoza’s redenering conform zijn PSR-stijl. Ik kon al eens een blog schrijven: “Ook Ursula Renz moet niets hebben van de 'dubbele PSR'” [cf].

“The Great Confusion: Formal Essences and Actual Essences in Spinoza”

Focus on the so-called PSR among US Spinozists, spearheaded by Michael Della Rocca, has had an interesting methodological corollary in analytical philosophy and in contemporary metaphysics in particular: a heightened respect for rationalism at the expense of lowered respect for pre-philosophical intuitions, and in particular for those intuitions that refer to common sense. Hence, when we go about our philosophizing we should constantly ‘check’ our rationally obtained conclusions against sets of pre-philosophical intuitions setting the limits for what will be considered acceptable. However, the agenda Della Rocca defends is opposed to this generally accepted ‘method of intuitions.’ The thing, of course, is that without any other guidance than this ‘reason’, we sometimes end up with some rather puzzling conclusions. Indeed, the general popularity of this new Spinoza-inspired radical rationalism has given rise to a whole interpretive culture, where this sort of conclusion is often welcomed rather than shunned, even among analytically minded Spinozists who are not per se passengers on the PSR-train. Unfortunately, the price of such ‘untaming’ of philosophy seems to be loss of understanding, because the conclusions reached may have been obtained in a rationally rigorous fashion, but do not make a whole lot of sense. I look here at an example where the exclusive concern for conceptual connections and disregard for other aspects of meaning-formation tends to lead to nonsense, and where accommodating, or checking against, certain seemingly non-conceptual aspects of meaning-formation may undeniably help to make better sense of Spinoza, making it hard to remain a hardline rationalist when it comes to interpretation. The example I will consider comes from another of the great analytical commentators, namely Don Garrett. Garrett is not a partisan of the PSR and the antiintuitionist movement spearheaded by Della Rocca and Melamed. But I do think he has been somewhat smitten by the PSR movement when it comes to welcoming counter-intuitive conclusions, at least in the case I will consider here. It is taken from a paper written for the recent Cambridge Companion to Spinoza’s Ethics edited by Olli Koistinen, and concerns Spinoza’s notions of formal essence and actual essence."

British Society for the History of Philosophy Annual Conference The Actual and the Possible 16th-18th April 2013 [PDF]

Een paar maanden eerder, op 18 december 2012 had hij deze lezing ook al eens gegeven op een Italiaans Seminario over "Essentia Actuosa - riletture dell’Etica di Spinoza" [Cf.]

spinoza | 20-03-2013 | 11:06 | Link | Reacties (1)