This book is the fruit of twenty-five years of study of Spinoza by the editor and translator of a new and widely acclaimed edition of Spinoza's collected works. Based on three lectures delivered at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1984, the work provides a useful focal point for continued discussion of the relationship between Descartes and Spinoza, while also serving as a readable and relatively brief but substantial introduction to the Ethics for students. Behind the Geometrical Method is actually (...) two books in one. The first is Edwin Curley's text, which explains Spinoza's masterwork to readers who have little background in philosophy. This text will prove a boon to those who have tried to read the Ethics, but have been baffled by the geometrical style in which it is written. Here Professor Curley undertakes to show how the central claims of the Ethics arose out of critical reflection on the philosophies of Spinoza's two great predecessors, Descartes and Hobbes. The second book, whose argument is conducted in the notes to the text, attempts to support further the often controversial interpretations offered in the text and to carry on a dialogue with recent commentators on Spinoza. The author aligns himself with those who interpret Spinoza naturalistically and materialistically. (shrink)

Spinoza ' s understanding and understanding Spinoza -- Spinoza ' s understanding -- Understanding Spinoza -- The metaphysics of substance -- Descartes and substance -- Spinoza contra Descartes on substance -- Modes -- Necessitarianism -- The purpose of it all -- The human mind -- Parallelism and representation -- Essence and representation -- Parallelism and mind - body identity -- The idea of the human body -- The pancreas problem, the pan problem, and panpsychism -- Nothing but representation -- Representation, (...) will, and belief -- Skepticism -- Psychology : striving and self - preservation -- Conatus -- Desire, joy, and sadness -- Love, hate, and all that -- The ethics of the ethics -- The good notion of the good -- The right notion of the right -- Knowledge and morality -- Freedom and morality -- Helping others -- Lies and degrees of freedom -- The state, religion, and scripture -- Rights and power -- Religion and the state -- Scripture -- Prophecy and the truth of the Bible -- From PSR to eternity -- The aftermath of Spinoza -- Leibniz -- Bayle and Hume -- The pantheism controversy -- Hegel -- Nietzsche -- Prospects of spinozistic rationalism. (shrink)

This essay supports a so-called identification-oriented interpretation of the argument for substance monism. It emphasizes the conceptual barrier between different attributes and the conceptual-independence condition in the definition of substance. It argues that certain features of Spinoza’s notion of attributes enable him to defend his argument for substance monism from a number of challenges: the fact that, for Spinoza, each attribute of a substance, independently of the modes of the substance and independently of other attributes, is sufficient for conceiving of (...) the substance; and the fact that, for Spinoza, because of the conceptual independence of the attributes, no attribute of a substance can prevent that substance from having any other attribute. (shrink)

In this reinterpretation and reconstruction of Spinoza's thought, Donagan (humanities, Caltech) demonstrates that it was Spinoza's unique usage of traditional philosophical vocabulary that resulted in the history of misunderstanding that is his continuing fate. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.