Spinoza (book)

Spinoza
Cover of the first edition
Author Stuart Hampshire
Country United Kingdom
Language English
Subject Baruch Spinoza
Published 1951 (Faber & Faber h/b
Pelican Books p/b)
Media type Print (Hardcover and Paperback)
Pages 237 (1962 Penguin Books edition)
ISBN 978-0140202533

Spinoza (1951; second edition 1962; third edition 1987) is a book about Baruch Spinoza by the English philosopher Stuart Hampshire, in which the author introduces Spinoza's philosophy, comparing Spinoza's views to those of other philosophers such as René Descartes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, as well as drawing comparisons between Spinoza and Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. The work includes a foreword by the philosopher A. J. Ayer, while a new introduction was added to the 1987 edition. Spinoza has become a classic work about Spinoza and has received praise from philosophers. However, Hampshire's comparisons between Spinoza and Freud have been criticized for ignoring important differences between the two. In 2005, Spinoza, along with Hampshire's other writings on the philosopher, was incorporated into a single volume, published as Spinoza and Spinozism, which received negative reviews.

Summary

Hampshire praises Spinoza as "the most ambitious and uncompromising of all modern philosophers" and discusses Spinoza's thought in its 17th century context, contrasting him with other rationalist philosophers such as René Descartes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Hampshire believes that, while internally consistent, Spinoza's philosophy and especially his epistemology is "liable not to be appreciated" because it is simultaneously linked to two normally opposed traditions, nominalism and the coherence theory of truth.[1]

In Hampshire's view, while Spinoza "deliberately effaced his own personality and wished his philosophy to stand alone", there is enough evidence to show that Spinoza was an "exceptional" man. He provides lengthy discussions of Spinoza's conception of mind and will.[2] Hampshire compares Spinoza to Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. He sees a parallel between Spinoza's conatus and Freud's conception of libido, observing that Spinoza and Freud both understand emotions as being based upon a universal drive to self-preservation and maintain that frustration of this drive causes painful disturbance.[3]

Publication history

Spinoza was first published in 1951 as Spinoza: An Introduction to His Philosophical Thought.[4] Penguin Books published an edition of Spinoza that year.[5] In 1962, it published a revised edition.[6] In 1987, Spinoza was republished with a new introduction by Hampshire. In 2005, Spinoza, along with Hampshire's other writings on the philosopher, was incorporated into a single volume, published by Oxford University Press as Spinoza and Spinozism.[4]

Reception

Mainstream media

Spinoza and Spinozism was reviewed by the philosopher Avishai Margalit in The New York Review of Books and Susan James in the Times Higher Education Supplement.[4][7]

Margalit wrote that Spinoza was a publishing success, with 45,000 copies being sold in the first three months.[4]

Academic journals

Spinoza and Spinozism received negative reviews from the philosopher Beth Lord in The Philosophical Quarterly and Shannon Dea in Structurist.[8][9] The book also received a notice in Mind.[10]

Lord considered Hampshire's Spinoza a well-written introduction that placed the philosopher in a historical context and showed the relevance of the Ethics to contemporary philosophy. She praised Hampshire's text "Spinoza and the Idea of Freedom", another text included in Spinoza and Spinozism, crediting Hampshire with showing there that Spinoza's understanding of freedom is much richer than the simplistic characterization of it as understanding the causes of one's actions and with helping to relate Spinoza to Enlightenment political thought. She found Hampshire's case that Spinoza's thought is compatible with recent developments in theories of evolution, complexity and genetics persuasively argued, but in her view its value was diminished by Hampshire's problematic interpretation of the Ethics, which wrongly introduced "a theory of intentionality into Spinoza’s concept of action." She concluded that while each of the three pieces included in Spinoza and Spinozism is independently valuable, the book as a whole was not well conceived.[8]

Dea called Spinoza a classic and praised it and "Spinoza and the Idea of Freedom". He credited Hampshire, in his late reflections on the centrality of biology to Spinoza's philosophy, with clarifying the differences between Spinoza and Descartes and correcting some of the views he had expressed in Spinoza, such as those concerning similarities between Spinoza's concept of conatus and Freud's principle of libido, which in Dea's view ignored the fact that Freud saw each person as having only a fixed amount of psychic energy. He welcomed the fact that rather than focusing on Freud, Hampshire instead discussed the conatus as a "biological principle of vitality". He also noted that Hampshire abandoned his previous emphasis on "the mathematical nature of Spinoza's thought and writing", finding his new account of Spinoza "not only more interesting and important but also more plausible than his earlier one." However, he criticized Hampshire for failing to apply his biological interpretation of Spinoza's metaphysics more consistently, and for suggesting that "only organisms count as things for Spinoza", writing that it expresses "a variety of anthropocentrism that goes against central Spinozist tenets." He described Hampshire's late work on Spinoza as "inchoate" and wrote that it contained errors and that its hermeneutical approach was questionable. He suggested that it may have been a collection of notes by Hampshire misleadingly presented as an essay by the editors of Spinoza and Spinozism. He found the book as a whole to suffer from negligence on the part of its publisher.[9]

Evaluations in books

The philosopher A. J. Ayer, writing in the foreword to Spinoza, praised the lucidity of Hampshire's exposition of Spinoza.[11] The classicist Norman O. Brown, writing in Life Against Death (1959), argued that while Hampshire provides an acute comparison between Spinoza and Freud, he fails to recognize important differences between the two, such as Freud's dualism.[12] Brown wrote in a 1989 article that was published in Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis (1991) that Spinoza is the classic statement of the view that Spinoza's materialism and rejection of mind-body dualism are supportive of hope in scientific enlightenment and economic development. He criticized Hampshire for interpreting Spinoza's monism as a form of quasi-religious mysticism, thus creating an apparent contradiction between it and Spinoza's materialism. He also argued that Spinoza's thought has communist implications that Hampshire ignores.[13] The philosopher Edwin Curley, writing in A Spinoza Reader (1994), described Spinoza as "an excellent general introduction to Spinoza's thought".[14]

The philosopher R. S. Downie, writing in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (1995), suggested that Spinoza is the key to understanding Hampshire's own views on freedom and the philosophy of mind.[15] The philosopher Roger Scruton, writing in his own work titled Spinoza (1996), called Hampshire's Spinoza "the most succinct and rewarding" modern commentary on Spinoza.[16] Scruton has also expressed the view that while "path-breaking", Spinoza is now dated.[17] Hampshire, writing in his introduction to the 1996 Penguin Classics edition of Spinoza's Ethics, observed that since the publication of Spinoza in 1951, "there have been large changes in the interests of English-speaking philosophers, and in expounding the Ethics emphasis will now tend to fall in different places to meet these contemporary concerns."[18] The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, writing in Looking for Spinoza (2003), agreed with Hampshire's view that Spinoza "deliberately wanted to purge his texts of personal feeling and rhetoric."[19]

References

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Hampshire 1962, pp. 11, 14–26, 116.
  2. ↑ Hampshire 1962, pp. 64–65, 128–129, 227.
  3. ↑ Hampshire 1962, pp. 141–144.
  4. 1 2 3 4 Margarlit 2005, pp. 48–50.
  5. ↑ Hampshire 1996, p. xvii.
  6. ↑ Hampshire 1962, p. 4.
  7. ↑ James 2006, p. 24.
  8. 1 2 Lord 2006, pp. 450–452.
  9. 1 2 Dea 2007, pp. 100–104.
  10. ↑ Mind 2005, pp. 1223–1225.
  11. ↑ Ayer 1962, p. 7.
  12. ↑ Brown 1985, p. 47.
  13. ↑ Brown 1991, pp. 127–128.
  14. ↑ Curley 1994, p. xxxiv.
  15. ↑ Downie 2005, p. 358.
  16. ↑ Scruton 1996, p. 118.
  17. ↑ Scruton 2002, p. 299.
  18. ↑ Hampshire 1996, p. vii.
  19. ↑ Damasio 2003, pp. 263, 300, 328.

Bibliography

Books

  • Ayer, A. J.; Hampshire, Stuart (1962). Spinoza. London: Penguin Books.
  • Brown, Norman O. (1991). Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-07298-7.
  • Brown, Norman O. (1985). Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press. ISBN 0-8195-6144-4.
  • Curley, Edwin; Spinoza, Benedict de (1994). A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-00067-0.
  • Damasio, Antonio (2003). Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. Orlando: Harcourt Books. ISBN 0-15-100557-5.
  • Downie, R. S.; Honderich, Ted, Editor (2005). The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-926479-1.
  • Hampshire, Stuart (1962). Spinoza. London: Penguin Books.
  • Hampshire, Stuart; Spinoza, Benedict de (1996). Ethics. London: Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-043571-9.
  • Scruton, Roger (2002). A Short History of Modern Philosophy. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-26763-3.
  • Scruton, Roger (1996). Spinoza. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-287630-9.
Journals

  • Dea, Shannon (2007). "Spinoza and Spinozism". Structurist (47/48).  – via EBSCO's Academic Search Complete (subscription required)
  • James, Susan (2006). "Of the man and his masks". Times Higher Education Supplement (1737).  – via EBSCO's Academic Search Complete (subscription required)
  • Lord, Beth (2006). "Spinoza and Spinozism". The Philosophical Quarterly. 56 (224).  – via EBSCO's Academic Search Complete (subscription required)
  • Margarlit, Avishai (2005). "The Genius of Spinoza". The New York Review of Books. 52 (16).
  • "Books Received". Mind. 114 (456). 2005.  – via EBSCO's Academic Search Complete (subscription required)
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.