On the State of Spinoza and the Sciences.

Yesterday Oliver Istvan Toth (Graz) announced the publication of “The possibility of knowing the essence of bodies through scientific experiments in Spinoza’s controversy with Boyle” (here) in British Journal for the History of Philosophy (BJHP). BJHP is a leading (if not the leading) journal in the history of philosophy today, so he was naturally quite pleased. I share the picture with Oliver’s permission.

I was, of course, quite pleased to see my name coupled with Michael Della Rocca (whom I admire greatly) and that at least somebody associated my work with a scholarly mainstream position. As I joked online, it was a nice way to find out that I was the research frontier shortly before being refuted.:)

The paper is clearly argued and a model of interpretive charity. It’s also very interesting on the substantive issues. Go read it.

Now, I want to say something about the nature of my disagreement with Oliver and also why it matters. But before I get there a few sociological observations. When I was a PhD student (let’s say a quarter century ago) most papers in my then subfield (‘early modern’) were basically mini-monographs — they were often quite long, too 10,000-12,000 words were not uncommon— were people would lay out their views and other scholars were cited as sources and sometimes disagreed with briefly or in a footnote ‘cf.’ The focus on the main body of the text was on the texts to be interpreted not on the interpretations of other scholars.

As I also have noted repeatedly over the years, often citations of living scholars seemed more about status signaling than not. Sometimes a ‘big shot’ (that’s a technical term) would write a paper in which the clear disagreement with another ‘big shot’ was front and center in a paper, but that’s not how I remember it being the norm.

This state of affairs had already begun to shift when I went on the market. In Hume scholarship, for example, there was a then intense debate on ‘the new Hume’ controversy where people were clearly debating each other’s positions. About fifteen years ago, I was part of a multi-faceted debate on action-at-distance in Newton scholarship, where engaging with each other’s arguments was as important as getting Newton quotes lined up properly. When I returned to look at the field (when I put Newton’s Metaphysics: Essays together) there were so many high quality new contributions, I wrote a lengthy new paper responding to criticisms and developing my own views.

This is obviously a healthy development for citation scores (if your position ends up being recognized as worth engaging with—but again see the worry about status above). It can be useful, too, for development of a sense of community and for creating shared baselines about where the challenging interpretive issues are. Okay, so much for my first set of sociological observations.

Some texts are studied by specialist scholars and are also part of the currency of professional philosophers. Those are actually quite few in number: Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, etc. Plotinus has expert scholarship, for example, but most professional philosophers know really nada about Plotinus (except that he is a Platonist). Even most of those authors are not really read much by most professional philosophers, and what is read and taught in the curriculum tends to be a rather narrow slice of their work. A few incredibly rare thinkers have texts that are studied by specialist scholars and are also part of the currency of professional philosophers as well as a wider learned audience. That number is very small (Nietzsche, Spinoza, Plato, etc.) I am just old enough that when I was an undergraduate, analytic philosophers would pretend not to understand Nietzsche.

What makes it fun to work on authors that are studied by specialist scholars and are also part of the currency of professional philosophers as well as read by a learned public is that one’s interpretation of the author might possibly be of interest to more than a bunch of fellow scholars. But it also generates some tricky challenges—such texts often play (ahh) semiotic or symbolic roles in the culture and in the discipline that are either far removed from the expert scholar’s concerns or the function of the currency in the discipline.

So, for example, we all know ‘Hume is a naturalist’ and ‘Hume is a leading figure in the Scottish Enlightenment’ (and he awoke Kant from a slumber, etc.) He was explicitly trying to found a ‘science of man.’ So, he must have been a fan of Newton or a Newtonian in some sense. When I still believed that myself, I also had to conclude that he was very confused about or simply mistaken on Newton and science.

A part of my academic life has been devoted to arguing, by contrast, that in many respects Hume was a critic of Newton and Newtonianism and a critic of the kind of sciences inspired by Newton in his own age. Many of these criticisms are unrelated to the ‘problem of induction’ as such. Yet, Hume was not anti-scientific or against science (for an overview of the state of the debates see here).

When I first presented the ideas in the previous two paragraphs at a talk at an early modern conference at Harvard, a very good friend and distinguished scholar said to me, ‘if you are right, then Hume is irrelevant today.’ I didn’t understand that comment at first, but I came to realize that, in part, it meant that I was undermining the symbolic currency of Hume in the profession. (I actually think how to be critical of the science of one’s own age without becoming anti-scientific is very relevant for the profession, but let’s leave that aside.) However, it turned out that I was part of a wider group that was converging on similar ideas (Tamas Demeter, Yoram Hazony, Miren Boehm, Matias Slavov) and rather than a big debate, we helped define and constitute a new understanding of Hume for scholars interested in Hume. To the best of my knowledge nobody really cared, and for all I know people will still write sentences “inspired by Newton, Hume…” until the death of the universe.

As it happens, at that same conference Della Rocca and I met for the first time. And shortly thereafter he asked me if I wanted to write on Spinoza and Science for his handbook. At the time I didn’t think of myself a Spinoza scholar, but I liked the challenge, and threw myself in it. “Spinoza and the Philosophy of Science” is chapter 8 in his handbook.

Now, while I was writing the handbook chapter, I discovered that Alison Peterman and Alex Douglas (both then junior) were converging on very related views (their then unpublished dissertations are both cited by me). Also, while writing it I realized that I was reviving a view promoted by David Savan. And also echoing a view by Melamed which I didn’t realize until later. And since I grasped that I was converging with views held by Alan Nelson and his students, including Noa Shein.

A few of my claims about Spinoza are that it is a mistake to treat Spinoza as a fellow traveler with mathematical science (of the sort that Huygens, Galileo and Kepler practiced) and as a mechanical philosopher (Boyle). My position also had awkward implications about the status of the geometric method, amongst others.

I also knew that there were quite influential figures in the profession and in broader intellectual world that were promoting quite different views on Spinoza than my own. Take a look at this footnote at my partial sense of what I was up against:

I won’t deny I have been disheartened by Israel’s responses since. But much to my pleasure, and, unlike the work on Hume, this paper on Spinoza generated quite a bit of interest from scholars who used my ideas to develop their own views on Spinoza. In fact, Douglas and Peterman went quite beyond my own statement in precision and detail.

Before I continue. Spinoza scholarship has grown explosively during the past decade and a half. And it is distributed over many different fields and languages. So, all my generalizations should be treated with grain of salt (did I mention this is a blog not a review article).

Anyway, before Toth’s paper there were already a number of rather detailed studies that either tried to qualify some of my claims or push back on them altogether (I am thinking of work by Stephen Harrop (here) and Matthew Homan (here)). With Toth’s paper we can give a sense of what some of the big questions in the ‘spinoza and science’ debates are now.

First, in the Spinoza-Boyle exchange is Spinoza articulating his own philosophy of science, scientific methodology, and ontology or is he just offering very clever immanent criticism? If the former (as Toth argues), does Spinoza stick with these positions into the future, that is, the mature works of Ethics and TTP?

Why does this matter? If Toth is right then when it comes to empirical inquiry Spinoza is a kind of Baconian experimentalist. This reinforces the general significance of the impact of Bacon on Spinoza (something Jo Van Cauter also has argued). I myself had already argued for the significance of Bacon in Spinoza’s empirical methodologies (using the TTP to interpret the Ethics and the letters), but not the extent that Toth goes.

There is a deeper reason lurking here. Toth’s paper is silent on the status of mathematical sciences. But if Spinoza is best understood as a Baconian experimentalist in contextual detail, that might help interpret Spinoza’s views on (what was then known as) mixed mathematical sciences. (It would be interesting to try that out on the Letter on the Infinite.) It also distances Spinoza from Descartes in non-trivial ways.

And, most fundamentally, as Toth hints at, while drawing on Dana Jalobeanu’s excellent work, in the Baconian experimentalist tradition, “experiments are not valued for the results, but rather for their effect on the experimenter’s mind.” (I think that’s overstated, but leave that aside.) Crucially, then controlled empirical experiments help discipline and even co-constitute our minds. If this is also the view in the Ethics, then this has non-trivial impact on how we should understand Spinoza’s views on the attributes. To simplify: the debate has been between the objective interpretation (where attributes are part of the fundamental ontology of nature) and the subjective or idealist interpretation (where attributes are mind-dependent). [My own co-constitutive position has had no uptake, but somewhat surprisingly Toth’s argument may provide a new lease of life for it.]

Second, in Spinoza is there a distinction between “proper” common notions and “general” common notions? For, according to Toth in Spinoza proper common notions can be the source of knowledge about essence even if not of essences. I think Toth believes the distinction is implied in the following way: 2p37-38 are about general common notions and 2P39 about particular ones. Even if that’s true I don’t see the text of the proposition — using Curley’s translation, “If something is common to, and peculiar to, the human Body and certain external bodies by which the human Body is usually affected, and is equally in the part and in the whole of each of them, its idea will also be adequate in the Mind.” — as supporting the claim that this is knowledge about essences. But Toth cites a fairly recent book by Sangiacomo, so I clearly need to read that before I make up my mind.

Why does it matter? Well, lurking here is a debate over what according to Spinoza can be known about empirical nature through experimental means. If there are proper common notions and these provide knowledge about extended essences than these will constrain and, perhaps, even partially determine what empirical and experimental enquiry shows. (In the background is the idea — quite common up until Hume — that hidden essences of a thing are the source of sensible qualities of that thing, etc..)

Third, on Toth’s view, in the exchange with Boyle, Spinoza understood himself as part of a large intellectual community with shared standards and expectations on how to conduct empirical and experimental enquiry. How to reconcile this Spinoza with, say, the author of the appendix to Cartesian Principles of Philosophy is now worth reflecting on.

Why does it matter? The image of Spinoza as isolated (excommunicated, hermit-style) genius has to be thrown out of the door. Luckily, this view is not taken seriously by scholars of Spinoza. But the question does become what intellectual communities did Spinoza (perhaps) partially (and perhaps temporarily) self-identify with?

As an aside, Toth cautiously (and rightly) treats Spinoza’s familiarity with Glauber’s chemical work as a “conjecture” by Buyse. Buyse himself is not so cautious; he does not treat it as a conjecture at all, but thinks it is “certain” (building on Nadler)! This is not just a biographical matter, but partially also about the status of the mechanical philosophy in Spinoza’s thought, and also his familiarity with paracelsian ideas.

Okay let me wrap up with a final reflection on why all of this matters. When I first read the Boyle/Spinoza exchange I found it barely intelligible. When I later used it and sort of mastered its vocabulary, I primarily saw its significance, if at all, for the history of seventeenth century philosophy of science and the history of intellectual networks. In my view it showed Spinoza had quite a subtle understanding of the methodological and evidential practices of his age. That’s not nothing, but also not surprising given Spinoza’s other writings.

Toth’s paper goes well beyond that; it’s the third or fourth paper focused on the Spinoza-Boyle correspondence as such. In fact, it is part of a more general rehabilitation of, perhaps even discovery of, the substantial significance of the Spinoza-Boyle exchange itself as a major intellectual episode that is interesting in its own right and also for the light it sheds on the complex nature and interaction of the metaphysical and epistemological commitments and tenor of both thinkers, and how these are situated in the wider intellectual universe at the time.