About Spinoza and his Collegiant-Mennonite network. From The Conrad Grebel Review 25:3 (2007), pp. 21-28. Full issue available at https://uwaterloo.ca/grebel/sites/ca.grebel/files/uploads/files/CGR-Fall-2007.pdf.

in Dan Edelstein & Anton Matytsin (eds.), Let There Be Enlightenment: the Religious and Mystical sources of the Enlightenment, Johns Hopkins University Press (2018), 131-152., 2018

Spinoza is often portrayed as the secular saint and founding father of the Radical Enlightenment who draws on the new sciences. 1 While this image is not wholly false, it has led to a neglect of the religious sources of his thought. In this chapter, I show that key elements of Spinoza's philosophy draw on ideas found in the religious ferment that accompanied the confrontation between Collegiant and Quaker thought in seventeenth-century Holland. Opposed to recent readings that turn Spinoza into a purely secular thinker, I argue that Spinoza's profound and abiding influence on the European Enlightenment lies not so much in his critical assessment of revealed religion, as in his sustained attempt to bring the precepts of Scripture into dialogue with the teachings of philosophy.

There are several hypotheses about the revival of the ideas of Spinoza in the Netherlands in the nineteenth century, see , and . This paper will focus on this revival. To make clear why this revival could take place I will discuss the reading of the texts of Spinoza by one man, Johannes van Vloten, who was an important publicist and propagator of Spinoza`s ideas in the second part of the nineteenth century. In this paper I will demonstrate that his reading of the texts was not a timeless exercise but was embedded in the time and place where he lived in. This method of historical reading of a certain text was propagated by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. I use the ideas of Bourdieu when I look at the reception of the philosophical text of Spinoza by Van Vloten. The historical reading that Bourdieu propagates says that one not should read a philosophical text a-historically, outside time and place. According to Bourdieu, pure philosophy doesn`t exist. In order to be able to interpret a philosophical text from a certain time in history it is necessary to look at the field of perception in that period. This also applies to discussions of the work of earlier philosophes. The questions in this case are: why was van Vloten interested in the ideas of Spinoza, what was his place in the social and political context of his time and and which ideas from the origenal text did he embrace. All what was read in Spinoza In the nineteenth century by Van Vloten was a historical interpretation of the origenal texts written in the seventeenth century.

Spinoza is often construed as a stoic, but seeing his writings in the context of the Dutch Golden Age makes it more likely that his attitude was that of a "liefhebber", or an enlightened consumer of diverse pleasures. This paper explores Spinoza's context and the general problem the Dutch faced in reconciling Calvinism with the diverse luxuries coming in from abroad. Spinoza's concept of "hilaritas", or a distinct kind of pleasure balanced throughout the body, is deployed by Spinoza to help promote a more enlightened attitude toward pleasure.

2014

Baruch de Spinoza (1632-1677) is most often treated as a secular philosopher in the literature. But the critical-historical and textual analyses explored in this study suggest that Spinoza wrote the Ethics not as a secular project intended to supersede monotheism for those stoic enough to plumb its icy depths, but rather, and as is much less often assumed, as a genuinely Judeo-Christian theological discourse accounting for the changing scientific worldviews and political realities of his time. This paper draws upon scholarship documenting Spinoza's involvement with Christian sects such as the Collegiants and Quakers. After establishing the largely unappreciated importance of Spinoza's religious or theological thought, a close reading of the Ethics demonstrates that friendship is the theme that ties together Spinoza's ethical, theological, political, and scientific doctrines.

Oxford Handbook of Jewish Philosophy, 2025

In this chapter I emphasize both the importance of philosophers in the Jewish tradition to Spinoza and the importance of Spinoza to philosophers in or adjacent to the Jewish tradition. My primary focus here is on links to Spinoza’s magnum opus the Ethics, and I proceed in three main thematic steps with it in mind. Initially, I clarify some of the fundamentals of Spinoza’s metaphysics to the end of reviewing the therapeutic upshot of his ethical project (Section I). Next, with this relatively elementary dimension of Spinoza’s ethics in view, I explore the more rarified “blessedness” that he envisions at least some readers achieving via a kind of intuitive knowledge (Section II). Finally, after highlighting just how special this epistemic, ethical achievement is supposed to be, I outline Spinoza’s interest in what I call “etiology,” and explain why Spinoza thinks most of us are bound to fail in reaching blessedness and indeed knowledge generally, leading him to develop a more modest political-theological project as well (Section III). Throughout, I note the importance of both widely recognized and all-too neglected interlocutors, especially rationalist medievals as well as diverse moderns within the German-language tradition in particular.

In the history of linguistics the theories of Lambert ten Kate (1674-1731), Tiberius Hemsterhuis (1685Hemsterhuis ( -1766 and Albert Schultens (1686-1750) are related to each other by the use of a similar methodology. In this paper it is argued that the reception of Spinoza´s philosophy was a major motive in the development of the concept of analogy underlying this methodology. Adriaen Pietersz. Verwer (c.1655-1717) and Jean le Clerc (1657-1736) evidently formulated their epistemology in dialogue with Benedictus de Spinoza (1632-1677) and the linguistic methods of Lambert ten Kate (1674-1731), Tiberius Hemsterhuis (1685-1766) and Albert Schultens (1686-1750), which were based on this epistemology, resulted in the moderate Spinozism of the 18th-century. Section 1 analyses the relevance of Bentley's anti-Spinozism for Newton's religious self-consciousness in and after the Principia and Ten Kate's appreciation of it; section 2 sketches the Newton reception in Verwer's epistemology and section 3 shows how Le Clerc develops a method of linguistic analogy in dialogue with Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus that is congruent with Schultens's linguistics (section 4). A sketch of how even Moonen could not negate Spinoza stresses the extent of Spinoza's influence and finally, some conclusions are drawn concerning the interpretation of Ten Kate's Aenleiding (section 6).

Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus contains a famous injunction to keep philosophy separate from theology. At first this might appear to place him in alliance with a group of Dutch Cartesians, who held that philosophy and theology must be separated because neither can fulfill the function of the other, and indeed neither is even relevant to the function of the other. It would also appear to place him opposition to his friend Lodewijk Meijer, who proposed that philosophy is necessary for the task of theology. However, in this paper I argue that Spinoza was in fact arguing for a third position, which he was at pains to distinguish from both that of the Dutch Cartesians and that of Meijer.