Michael Campbell and Sarah Tropper

Peter Winch was a British philosopher known for his work in the philosophy of social science and ethics, as well as for his interpretations of the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Simone Weil. But it is less well known that, throughout his career, Winch also engaged in various ways with Spinoza's philosophy. He published two articles on Spinoza's thought, one a critical notice of Jonathan Bennett's book, A Study of Spinoza's Ethics, the other a discussion of the relation between mind and body in the Ethics. Alongside this, in his other work Winch referred to Spinoza's views, either in passing or as a foil, when discussing topics such as the nature of religious belief and the relationship between metaphysics and ethics.

Winch's interpretation of Spinoza developed out of a close reading of the Ethics and De Emendatione, and he gave two sets of seminars on them; first at the University of Swansea in 1982 and then again at King's College London in 1989. Despite the progress in Spinoza scholarship made since then, Winch's reading remains worthy of consideration due to its idiosyncrasies both of style and content. His aim is not only to introduce his audience to Spinoza's thought but also to encourage them to engage with this difficult material on their own terms. Winch finds three issues to be central to Spinoza's philosophical concerns, namely, the position of man in relation to the universe; the inseparability of the theoretical and practical; and the relation of judgement, ideas and the world. This focus yields an engaging interpretation of Spinoza's work, one that takes the ethical and metaphysical aspects of the Ethics to be inseparable, and which unifies them under the concept of the understanding. Winch expresses this conviction, in characteristically laconic fashion, at the beginning of the seminars: