Spinoza in The Making of the Humanities
Zojuist ontdekte ik dat het volgende boek behalve dat het gedrukt is uitgebracht, ook als PDF door de Univ. v. Amsterdam op internet is gebracht. Het verscheen in hetzelfde jaar als Rens Bod’s De vergeten wetenschappen. Een geschiedenis van de humaniora [Bert Bakker, 2010 – zie dit blog met in reactie daarop een felle kritiek van Wim Klever]. Rens Bod was ook mederedacteur van
Rens Bod, Jaap Maat, Thijs Weststeijn (Eds.) The Making of the Humanities. Volume 1- Early Modern Europe. Amsterdam University Press, 2010
[AUP] [books.google] [PDF]
2 x Spinoza
In Deel 1 - The Humanities versus the Sciences• Michiel Leezenberg, “How Comparative Should a Comparative History of the Humanities Be? The Case of the Dutch Spinoza Circle”
Intro: "Michiel Leezenberg argues for a worldwide perspective on the history of the humanities, as is becoming common practice in the historiography of the natural sciences. He illustrates his arguments with a case study of the non-European influence on Spinoza and his circle."
in Deel 6 - Philology and Philosophy• Piet Steenbakkers, “Spinoza in the History of Biblical Scholarship”
Intro: "The essay by Piet Steenbakkers explores the circulation of knowledge with respect to Spinoza’s role as a philologist and his place in the history of biblical scholarship. Spinoza’s interest in the Bible was not strictly philosophical but had strong philological and linguistic penchants, too. Steenbakkers shows how Spinoza played a crucial role in the dramatic decline of the status of the Bible in western civilization."
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Ik kwam het PDF op het spoor speurend naar nadere informatie over conferentie die van 30 aug. tot en met 1 sept. 2012 in Utrecht zal worden gehouden, "God's Word Questioned: Biblical Criticism and Scriptural Authority in the Dutch Golden Age" – in het kader van het research project Biblical Criticism and Secularization in the Seventeenth Century van Henk Nellen (van het Huygens Instituut), Dirk van Miert, Jetze Touber en Piet Steenbergen. Over dat project geeft Steenbakkers in zijn hoofdstuk “some preliminary observations on Spinoza’s contribution to the development of biblical scholarship.” [Hier meer over die geleerden-conferentie).
Uit Steenbakkers hoofdstuk citeer ik graag de volgende passage (zonder referenties) over Spinoza en wetenschap
"Unlike Descartes and Leibniz, Spinoza, for all his mathematical rigour, did not contribute anything at all to the development of mathematics; nor to the development of physics, despite his skill in optics. But he did indeed leave his mark on the subsequent history of biblical scholarship. Before the nineteenth century, scholars had no qualms about combining mathematics, natural philosophy and philology, a mix that no longer seems obvious to us. The concept of ‘science’, particularly in the English-speaking countries, now virtually coincides with that of the natural sciences. This is not the case with German Wissenschaft (nor with Dutch wetenschap, for that matter) and, more importantly: such a concept of science is a fairly recent phenomenon – it was unknown in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the early modern period, ‘science’ included philology. We must of course also be aware that the term ‘philology’ as we understand it today is itself a historical product – like ‘science’ – again shaped to a considerable degree by nineteenth-century practice. Though the word has ancient origins, it acquired its modern content, implying such diverse aspects as the historical study of languages, textual criticism and hermeneutics, only gradually in the Italian Renaissance, and more specifically in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, owing to scholars like Josephus Justus Scaliger, Isaac Casaubon, Daniel Heinsius and Gerard Vossius. Precisely because of its encyclopedic, comprehensive and polymathic character, philology did not demarcate itself clearly from theology, law, medicine, philosophy, history or the study of nature. Though Spinoza never uses the term, he obviously works within the horizon of what his contemporaries would have labelled critica sacra or philologia sacra, and those who reacted critically to his analysis of the history of the Bible could not resist playing down his originality, by spelling out his debts both to the humanistic philological tradition and to other philosophers. As far as Spinoza was concerned, in investigating the historia of the Bible he was not involved in an undertaking essentially different from what he was doing in the Ethics or in the Hebrew grammar – a text he had also intended to expound more geometrico. Nor is it any different from the study of nature."[Ik stel Wim Klever voor zijn reactie waarnaar ik aan het begin van dit blog verwees, hier niet te herhalen]
Reacties
Noch het hoofdstuk van Leezenberg noch dat van Steenbakkers brengt iets nieuws of heeft een inhoud van enige betekenis, waar we van op zouden kijken: ambtelijke werkstukken zonder fouten maar ook zonder inspiratie.
Wim Klever 21-06-2012 @ 20:36