Spinoza and the Sciences (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 479 of nature through the same causal mechanism. This mechanism was what enabled Gassendi to give a reductive account of ordinary sense perceptions in terms of the motions of colorless, tasteless, odorless atoms impacting on our sense organs. Reservations such as these concerning the two authors' readings of Gassendi make it difficult to side with the interpretative conclusions of either one. Perhaps, however, the puzzles generated by their conflicting interpretations can offer us some clues as to where to look next for the real Gassendi. LYNN S. JoY University of Notre Dame Marjorie Grene and Debra Nails, eds. Spinoza and the Sciences. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 9 a. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1986. Pp. xix + 336. $54.5o. What is Spinoza's relation to the sciences? This is the central issue in this collection of studies, to which various, even sharply contrasting answers are given. They range from the view that there was no intimate relation at all between Spinoza and science, as is maintained by Nancy Maull in her article "Spinoza in the Century of Science," to the position that Spinozism was the dogmatic underpinning of classical mechanics, a view put forward by Hans Jonas's paper on parallelism and complementarity (originally published in 198o), to the conviction that Spinoza may be regarded as the forerunner of twentieth-century science, a position taken by Joe D. van Zandt (in "Res Exter~a and the Space-Time Continuum") and Michel Paty in "Einstein and Spinoza," which explains the nature of the deep relation he believes these two thinkers have. The collection, consisting of twelve articles, is divided into five parts, of which the first pays attention to Spinoza and Cartesianism. Thus Heine Siebrand deals with the role of physics in the Dutch universities and Spinoza's critique of Cartesian concepts. Since Cartesian sciences played such an important role in the development of classical physics, Spinoza's criticism needs to be analyzed carefully. This is done by Andr6 Lecrivain in his lucid paper "Spinoza and Cartesian Mechanics," which gives an exposition of those themes of the mechanistic conception to which Spinoza devoted special attention. Spinoza's views about the problem of methodology are dealt with in Part 2 in Alexandre Matheron's study of Spinoza and Euclidean arithmetic, in which he investigates Spinoza's example of the fourth proportional, his aim being to show that this example is neither trivial nor ill-chosen but perfectly germane (125). David Savan analyzes Spinoza's empirical methodology, elaborating the thesis that on the ground of his deductive system Spinoza is a rationalist, but that at the same time he is convinced of the importance of experience and experiment. As a working scientist Spinoza was, according to Savan, very accurate, giving close attention to empirical details. Spinoza may not have been a practitioner of experimental physics, but he was a practitioner of other sciences, such as classical political science and scientific hermeneu- 480 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY ~7:3 JULY 1989 tics. To these aspects attention is given in Part 3, in which Joseph Agassi presents Spinoza as the leading contributor to classical political theory. Agassi contests the traditional view of physics as the true and leading pioneer science: certainly the revolution in physics was related to the one in politics, but, as Agassi emphasizes, the revolution in politics was much more profound, both in its depth and in the effects it had on our outlook in life (157). He also touches upon Spinoza's Bible criticism, an issue taken up in Richard H. Popkin's stimulating contribution, which illustrates how Spinoza's critical statements in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus are comparable to the Bible critiques of Christian contemporaries, such as the Quaker Samuel Fisher and the Dutch Collegiant and Hebraist Adam Boreel, as well to the views of Rabbi Nathan Shapira. Whether or not these three men were personally acquainted with Spinoza and thus would have greatly influenced him, the similarities between their views and Spinoza's ideas are indeed striking and, as Popkin suggests, further research may lead to the view that Spinoza's biblical criticism represents "a distillation of some of the radical views...