BdSpinoza

Review van "Spinoza and Medieval Jewish Philosophy"

Daniel H. Frank, Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University; Director, Jewish Studies Program [cf.] verzorgde voor de NDPR de recensie van

Steven Nadler (ed.), Spinoza and Medieval Jewish Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, 2014. [cf. op dit blog méér]

Ik neem hier (zonder voetnoot) de eerste en laatste alinea over:

The connective 'and' in the title of this collection does considerable work. It serves to bridge Spinoza with his predecessors in Jewish philosophy in a variety of ways, both comparative and more directly chronological. For some decades now, commencing with Warren Zev Harvey's classic 1981 article, "A Portrait of Spinoza as a Maimonidean", there has been much work done on tracing Spinoza's philosophical lineage beyond that of so-called "continental rationalism". The lens is wider than that. More and more we see Spinoza as indebted (malgré lui) to Maimonides and Gersonides no less than to Descartes and Hobbes. And such indebtedness, carrying in its train a salutary muddying of the historiographical story we tell our students, allows us to see Spinoza as really a Janus-faced figure, much as Harry Wolfson discerned. Spinoza may well be seen as both the last of the medievals and the first of the moderns. We usually give the foundational prize for 'father of modern philosophy' to Descartes, but if we change, perhaps not unreasonably, the regnant criterion from epistemology to political philosophy and philosophical theology, we may begin to pause. Hobbes begins to loom very large from this angle, but even he signaled the radicality of Spinoza, when, upon reading Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670), he uttered that he (Hobbes himself) "durst not write so boldly." In sum, Spinoza is more than a critic of Cartesian dualism; he is also a critic of medieval religious philosophy generally. And from this latter vantage point he, not Descartes, may be seen as the culmination of one epoch and, by virtue of his radicality, the commencing of something new.

[…]

This is a solid collection of essays. It is as important for what it forces one to understand about how to do philosophy in a historically interesting and revisionist way, as it is in presenting Spinoza both as a spoiler of what preceded him and as a foundational figure for what followed in his train. [NDPR]

De kritiek van de reviewer op de bijdrage van Steven Frankel die gaat over Spinoza's kritische lezing van Maimonides, tilt wellicht al een tipje van de sluier op over wat we mogen verwachten van het boek dat binnenkort, op 7 augustus 2015  gepland, gaat verschijnen:

Daniel Frank & Jason Waller, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Spinoza on Politics. Routledge, 2015 [cf. blog]  

spinoza | 10-06-2015 | 12:07 | Link | Reacties (1)