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Why Should We Read Spinoza?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 July 2016

Susan James
Susan James*
Affiliation:
Birkbeck College, London
*
s.james@mail.bbk.ac.uk
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Abstract

Historians of philosophy are well aware of the limitations of what Butterfield called ‘Whig history’: narratives of historical progress that culminate in an enlightened present. Yet many recent studies retain a somewhat teleological outlook. Why should this be so? To explain it, I propose, we need to take account of the emotional investments that guide our interest in the philosophical past, and the role they play in shaping what we understand as the history of philosophy. As far as I know, this problem is not currently much addressed. However, it is illuminatingly explored in the work of Spinoza (1632–77). Spinoza aspires to explain the psychological basis of our attachment to histories with a teleological flavour. At the same time, he insists that such histories are epistemologically flawed. To study the history of philosophy in a properly philosophical fashion we must overcome our Whiggish leanings.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 78: The History of Philosophy , July 2016 , pp. 109 - 125
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2016 

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References

1 Don Garrett, ‘Representation and Consciousness in Spinoza's Naturalistic Theory of the Imagination’ in C. Huenemann ed., Interpreting Spinoza: Critical Essays (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

2 Jonathan Bennett, A Study of Spinoza's Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 1984), para. 9, page 35.

3 Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested (Oxford University Press, 2006), 11.

4 Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London: G. Bell, 1931).

5 Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1946), 601.

6 See for example Eric Schliesser, ‘Philosophic Prophecy’ in M. Laerke, J. Smith and E. Schliesser eds, Philosophy and its History (Oxford, 2013), pp. 209–35.

7 Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow (Allen Lane, 2011); Quassim Cassam, Self Knowledge for Humans (Oxford University Press, 2014).

8 Spinoza, Ethics in E. Curley ed., The Collected Works of Spinoza (Princeton University Press, 1985), E3p27.

9 Ethics, IIIp32s.

10 Ethics 3p31c; 4p37s.

11 Ethics, I App. [1].

12 Spinoza, Tractatus Politicus in A.G. Wenham ed., The Political Works (Clarendon Press Oxford, 1958).