- The Young Spinoza: A Metaphysician in the Making ed. by Yitzhak Y. Melamed
What passes as Spinozism in most circles can be found in the first two parts of the Ethics, and even Spinoza scholars can be guilty of making only opportunistic use of weirder works such as the Short Treatise (KV) and Cogitata Metaphysica (CM). The goal of The Young Spinoza, Melamed explains in the introduction, is to stimulate research on Spinoza’s early works, both because of what serious consideration of those works can tell us about the Ethics and because they contain plenty of interesting philosophy.
The volume opens with a story about what would have been among Spinoza’s earliest works, if it indeed existed, and closes with a nod to the future—Spinoza’s composition of the Ethics. Edwin Curley’s sparkling contribution considers historical reports of an apologia that Spinoza wrote in response to his cherem; in this entirely enjoyable chapter, Curley draws on Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise (TTP) to speculate about the document’s contents. The volume closes with a nod to Spinoza’s later work in Pina Totaro’s analysis of the Vatican manuscript of the Ethics that she recently co-discovered. In between, essays address the collection’s goal in a variety of ways.
Several contributions compare issues in the Ethics with Spinoza’s early work, either finding that Spinoza’s views changed, or taking complementary texts from both early and [End Page 169] late work as evidence for an interpretive point. The engaging chapters by Ursula Renz and Daniel Garber on the evolution of Spinoza’s philosophy of mind fall into the first category, as does Michael LeBuffe’s compelling account of Spinoza’s reasons for ultimately rejecting the “rules of living” in the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (TIE). Melamed’s and Oded Schechter’s chapters are particularly ambitious members of this class: Melamed’s edifying contribution traces the evolution of Spinoza’s account of substance and attribute, and Schechter’s the changes in the kinds of cognition through the KV, TIE, and Ethics. Colin Marshall’s essay complements Schechter’s, focusing more narrowly on the change in Spinoza’s understanding of reason between the KV and Ethics.
Chapters harvesting evidence from both early and late texts include Karolina Hübner’s impressive contribution, which draws from the Ethics but ultimately turns on her reading of Spinoza’s “beings of reason” (entia rationis). The topic is an interesting one, and Spinoza addresses it in much more detail in early work than he does in the Ethics. Deep and interesting chapters by John Carriero and Samuel Newlands also take up the topic, combining careful textual analysis of Spinoza’s early work with more synoptic views of Spinoza’s system. John Brandau’s contribution also falls into this class, taking on the interesting question of Spinoza’s suggestion that essences come in degrees, using an arsenal of texts from all periods.
Several chapters treat early work independently of the Ethics, some using what they discover to reinterpret the Ethics. Valtteri Viljanen argues for the dominance of essentialism in the KV, while John Morrison analyzes the TIE’s discussion of truth, arguing for a novel Spinozistic account of truth that he claims also applies to the Ethics. Tad Schmaltz’s important essay primarily relies on the CM to argue that Spinoza deploys two different conceptions of eternity, and uses this to better understand Spinoza’s claim in Ethics 5 that the mind is eternal.
Finally, there are contributions such as Curley’s and Totaro’s that treat the young Spinoza’s work in its historical and philosophical context. Alan Nelson’s philosophically rich chapter uses Descartes’s Regulae to explore Spinoza’s view of the “given true idea” in the TIE. Filippo Mignini’s treatment of fictions also argues for Cartesian influence on early Spinoza. Russ Leo argues for the substantial influence of Calvinism on the KV. Mogens Lærke’s lively and learned contribution traces what he laments as...