Spinoza (book)

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]

Spinoza, which includes a foreword by the philosopher A. J. Ayer, was first published in 1951 as Spinoza: An Introduction to His Philosophical Thought.[4] Penguin Books published an edition of Spinoza that year;[5] a revised Penguin edition followed in 1962.[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]

Spinoza was a publishing success, with 45,000 copies being sold in the first three months.[4] The philosopher A. J. Ayer praised the lucidity of Hampshire's exposition of Spinoza,[7] while the philosopher Edwin Curley described Spinoza as "an excellent general introduction to Spinoza's thought".[8] The philosopher R. S. Downie suggested that Spinoza is the key to understanding Hampshire's views on freedom and the philosophy of mind.[9] The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio endorsed Hampshire's view that Spinoza "deliberately wanted to purge his texts of personal feeling and rhetoric."[10] The classicist Norman O. Brown 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.[11] Brown later described Spinoza as 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.[12] The philosopher Roger Scruton called Spinoza "the most succinct and rewarding" modern commentary on Spinoza,[13] however, Scruton has also expressed the view that while "path-breaking", the book is now dated.[14] In 1996, Hampshire observed that since its publication 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."[15]

Spinoza and Spinozism received negative reviews from the philosopher Beth Lord in The Philosophical Quarterly and Shannon Dea in Structurist.[16][17] The book was also reviewed by the philosopher Avishai Margalit in The New York Review of Books and Susan James in the Times Higher Education Supplement,[4][18] and received a notice in Mind.[19]

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.[16]

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.[17]

• Review of Spinoza and Spinozism by Avishai Margalit