Spinoza and Galileo: Nature and Transcendence

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Notes

¹ Translations used: The Collected Works of Spinoza, vol. 1, edited and translated by E. Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985) (henceforth referred to as C); Spinoza. The Letters, translated by S. Shirley (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 1995) (henceforth referred to as S). These translations are based on Gebhardt's edition of the Spinoza Opera (4 vols) (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1925) (henceforth referred to as G).

² P. Redondi, Galileo Heretic, translated by R. Rosenthal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 23; R. Feldhay, ‘The Use and Abuse of Mathematical Entities: Galileo and the Jesuits Revisited’, in The Cambridge Companion to Galileo, edited by P. Machamer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 133; J.-L. Marion, ‘The Idea of God’, in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth Century Philosophy, edited by D. Garber and M. Ayers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 269; W.L. Wisan, ‘Galileo and God's Creation’, Isis, 77 (1986), 477–8.

³ G. Galilei, ‘Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615)’, in G. Galilei, The Essential Galileo, edited and translated by M.A. Finocchiaro (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2008), 119.

⁴ E. McMullin, ‘Galileo on Science and Scripture’, in The Cambridge Companion to Galileo, edited by P. Machamer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 614; T. Rudavksy, ‘Galileo and Spinoza: Heroes, Heretics, and Hermeneutics’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 62 (2001), 614.

⁶ Redondi, ‘From Galileo to Augustine’, 210.

⁵ Galilei, ‘Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina’, 116.

⁷ Redondi, ‘From Galileo to Augustine’, 210.

⁸ Rudavsky, ‘Galileo and Spinoza’, 617.

⁹ Redondi, ‘From Galileo to Augustine’, 176.

¹⁰ Spinoza sees the lumen naturale as the first source of prophecy as being sure knowledge of the divine: see Tractatus theologico-politicus, chapt. 1.

¹¹ Wisan, ‘Galileo and God's Creation’, 473.

¹² Quoted in Wisan, ‘Galileo and God's Creation’, 479.

¹³ Wisan, ‘Galileo and God's Creation’, 484.

¹⁴ Galilei, ‘Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina’, 116.

¹⁵ Redondi, ‘From Galileo to Augustine’, 210.

¹⁶ Wisan, ‘Galileo and God's Creation’, 474.

¹⁷ At the beginning of the Modern Age, the two ideas are (usually) seen as incompatible; see Marion, ‘The Idea of God’, 268–70.

¹⁸ Galileo's name is not mentioned in the Lexicon Spinozanum of E.G. Boscherini.

¹⁹ Rudavsky, ‘Galileo and Spinoza’, 613.

²⁰ Spinoza has no mercy for scepticism, whether or not methodological. See his dismissal of scepticism in TEI §46–8 (C. 21–2).

²¹ Unlike Rudavsky, I do not think that their views on the interpretation of the Bible are similar. For one thing, Spinoza does not think at all that ‘(t)he Bible must be read and understood naturalistically, that is, in terms of the laws of physical causation’(Rudavsky, ‘Galileo and Spinoza’, 627).

²² See also R. Mason, The God of Spinoza. A Philosophical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) for an interpretation stressing the centrality of the notion of God and of the union of physics and theology.

²³ Letter 12 (1663) is still being referred to in 1676 (see Ep. 81, S. 352).

²⁴ P. Macherey, Introduction à l'Ethique de Spinoza. La troisième partie. La vie affective (Paris: PUF, 1995), 378 (I thank Frédéric Manzini for this reference).

²⁵ See also H. De Dijn, ‘Historical Remarks on Spinoza's Theory of Definition’, in Spinoza on Knowing, Being and Freedom (Proceedings), edited by J.G. van der Bend (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1974), 41–50.

²⁶ About transcendence in Spinoza, see also H. De Dijn, ‘Metaphysics as Ethics’, in God and Nature. Spinoza's Metaphysics (Proceedings First Jerusalem Conference), edited by Y. Yovel (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1991), 119–31 (129).

²⁷ M. Gueroult, Spinoza. I. Dieu (Éthique, 1) (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1968), 223.

²⁸ See also H. De Dijn, ‘Deus. Intellectus Dei. Voluntas Dei’, in The Continuum Companion to Spinoza, edited by W. van Bunge, H. Krop, P. Steenbakkers, and J. van de Ven (London/New York: Continuum, 2011), 196–8; and H. De Dijn, Spinoza. The Way to Wisdom (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1996), 206–9.

²⁹ Gueroult, Spinoza. I. Dieu, 300.

³⁰ Gueroult, Spinoza. I. Dieu, 291.

³¹ Gueroult, Spinoza. I. Dieu, 292.

³² See also H. De Dijn, ‘Conceptions of Philosophical Method in Spinoza: Logica and mos geometricus’, The Review of Metaphysics, 40 (1986), 55–78.

³³ About the relationship between Ethics IV and V, see H. De Dijn, ‘Ethics as Medicine for the Mind (5 P1–20)’, in Spinoza's Ethics. A Collective Commentary, edited by M. Hampe, U. Renz and R. Schnepf (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2011), 265–79.

³⁴ Further see H. De Dijn, ‘Spinoza and Religious Emotions’, in Religious Emotions. Some Philosophical Explorations, edited by W. Lemmens and W. Van Herck (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), 105–19.

³⁵ Spinoza here anticipates David Hume's The Natural History of Religion.

³⁶ See also H. De Dijn, ‘Spinoza's Theory of the Emotions in Its Relation to Therapy’, Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy, 5 (2010), 71–90.

³⁷ See also De Dijn, ‘Metaphysics as Ethics’.