A. Cameron asks why I equivocate on Spinoza but include Leibniz in my list of twenty-five. I studied Spinoza's Ethics in a semester-long course with the great Harry Austryn Wolfson that was one of the high points of my undergraduate education, so I was inclined to put him in. Wolfson taught him as, in effect, the last and greatest of the Medievals. His course connected Spinoza to the great debates in the Christian/Jewish/Muslim tradition. Leibniz, on the other hand, had a profound influence going forward on Kant and others. In addition, I think the Ethics is really impenetrable without a guide [such as Wolfson's own magnificent two-volume study].
However, my advice in all such cases of uncertainty is, Read it! This list is deliberately kept short and manageable in the perhaps vain hope that a serious graduate Philosophy student will actually attempt it.
By the way, I notice that I made a mistake in the numbering [see Aristotle]. The list is actually 26, not 25, titles long. I just reviewed it, and I think I had read maybe 24 or so of the titles [including a mess of the medieval stuff] by the time I got my degree, but I was only twenty-three then, so perhaps I may be excused. Also, I had taken four courses in Mathematical Logic plus Nelson Goodman's course on his first book, The Structure of Appearance.
I pass over in silence the suggestion that I comment on books I have never so much as looked at. I may be a blogging hacker, but I have some shreds of principles remaining!
I think Spinoza is, if anything, more influential than Leibniz, except that no-one could openly admit to being a Spinozist. Spinoza as a medieval is a strange way to look at him. To my way of thinking he's a key link in the modern re-appropriation of Epicureanism.
ReplyDeleteOK. You win. Add him to the list. :)
ReplyDeleteWhy could no one admit to being a Spinozist? I know several people who would say they are....
ReplyDeleteI believe mesnenor meant that at the time of Spinoza, one could not admit one was a Spinozist.
ReplyDeleteWhile I only have a BA in Philosophy, having dropped out of my grad program after one semester in '06, my sense is that, as mesnenor said, Spinoza is probably more influential than Leibniz; I feel even more sure of that claim if we restrict it to academic Philosophy of, say, the past fifteen years.
OK, I yield to the superior wisdom of the cloud. Put in Spinozaa [but do not take anyone out. 25 is not a sacred number.]
ReplyDeleteYes, I was referring to Spinoza's influence on 17th and 18th century thinkers. If you used Spinoza's language or terminology or restated his views too openly, you'd be branded as a heretic and an atheist and have to spend all your time arguing against churchmen and book-burners. There's a lot of discussion in some of the secondary literature on Leibniz about whether Leibniz is really a Spinozist. I think Leibniz is less of a Spinozist than most. The fact that his system is based on a multiplicity of individual substances, makes him really quite fundamentally non-Spinozist. I think a lot of the traditional rationalist/empiricist division in the traditional English-language histories of philosophy serves to draw a line of separation between the British thinkers and Spinoza, whereas in fact Locke and Hume were probably much closer to Spinoza in their views than Leibniz was.
ReplyDeleteWhen Jefferson referred to "Nature's God" in the Declaration of Independence, that's Spinoza's influence right there. It was filtered through a number of British deist intermediaries, but it came from Spinoza.