Website over Franciscus van den Enden
Frank Mertens van de Universiteit van Gent maakte een prachtige website over Franciscus van den Enden, een leermeester van Spinoza. De site biedt zeer veel informatie over leven en werk van Van den Enden en veel illustraties en documenten.
Hieronder citeer ik de inleiding op Van den Endens periode in de Republiek. Voor de rest en voor de voetnoten verwijs ik naar dat stuk.
"Most of the literature on Franciscus van den Enden focuses on his Amsterdam period. This bias is mainly caused because it was in this period that Van den Enden was the Latin teacher of the philosopher Benedictus de Spinoza (1632-1677). Consequently, most Spinoza biographies discuss Van den Enden and his part in Spinoza's life1. Another consequence is that, with the exception of his involvement in the Rohan plot, most of the research that has been conducted on Van den Enden also concentrated on the Dutch period. The only biographical monograph on Van den Enden published so far, for instance, contains little on Van den Enden's life prior to his move to Amsterdam2. A third consequence of this bias is that most of the primary sources on Van den Enden, again with the possible exception of the Rohan plot, date from this period. More recently, largely due to the discovery of two political pamphlets (the Brief Account of New Netherland and the Free Political Proposals), more attention has been paid to Van den Enden as an Early-Enlightened philosopher3. Since then, the importance of his role in Spinoza biographies seems to have grown, basically due to a more positive re-evaluation of the old question of whether he influenced Spinoza's philosophy4. Simultaneously, his position in the Early Modern Enlightenment, more specifically in the emergence of the 'Radical Enlightenment', appears to have been upgraded5. The primary aim of the subsequent pages is to give a reasonably thorough description of Van den Enden's Amsterdam period, incorporating the material that has become available after the publication of the biography by Meininger and Van Suchtelen6."
Er staan nog diverse delen gepland, maar de site is nu al een jaar niet meer geactualiseerd. Dus?
