Spinoza: Issues and Directions (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 291 pared. Akerman's style itself is often impenetrable, there are frequent misprints, and many important points are not properly documented. For example, on p. 77, she writes: "Recent research indicates that Hermetic philosophy played a role in generating sceptical libertinism in the development of Enlightenment Deism"; and on p. 94, she asserts that "Renaissance Hermeticism soon became a significant element of Florentine arts." Akerman offers neither citation nor argumentation for these and other such claims. However, in light of its scholarly potential, what is most frustrating about the book is the absence of an index return. This is a tragic oversight since the book contains discussions of so many intellectual movements and philosophical schools and might otherwise be a genuinely helpful research tool. Despite these real problems, Akerman's book is an impressive piece of scholarship. By solving many of the mysteries which have surrounded Queen Christina's life for centuries, Akerman's exhaustive study paints a vivid portrait of a truly exceptional woman. But Akerman has also done another great service: she has given us a proper response to the question, "Wasn't Queen Christina the one who killed Descartes?" We can now all declare, "No, it was Monaldesco whom she killed!" CHRISTIA MERCER Columbia University Edwin Curley and Pierre-Frangois Moreau, eds. Spinoza: Issues and Directions. The Proceedings of the Chicago Spinoza Conference. Brill's Studies in Intellectual History. Leiden: E.J. Briil, 199o. Pp. xiv + 4o4. Cloth, $9~.31. Spinoza: Issues and Directions, edited by Edwin Curley and Pierre-Franqois Moreau, is a collection of the thirty-one papers presented at the Chicago Spinoza Conference in 1986. Contributors include Henry Allison, l~tienne Balibar, Jonathan Bennett, Edwin Curley, Pierre Macherey, Alexandre Matheron, and Yirmiyahu Yovel. The editors have arranged the papers by subject (metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of mind, psychology, moral and political or social philosophy, and Spinoza's influence) and have provided a brief preface to the work. Twenty-four of the papers are in English; seven are in French, with a concentration of French-language scholarship on questions related to Spinoza's conception of the state and of history. Although the book is intended for specialists in Spinoza studies or the history of philosophy, most of the articles are accessible to readers with more general philosophical training. According to the editors, one purpose of the conference was "to reflect collectively on recent work on Spinoza, and to identify the major issues in current Spinoza studies and the lines of work most likely to be fruitful in the future" (ix). In fact, except for the late Hubertus Hubbeling's "Spinozism and Spinozistic Studies in the Netherlands since World War II," the texts of the presented papers mention these concerns only in passing. Still, the selection of topics in the anthology and the asides and references in the individual articles suggest that certain issues bore special appeal to scholars in the 198os. I have in mind such themes as Spinoza's views on the origin of the state (dis- 292 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 31:2 APRIL 1993 cussed in Antonio Negri's very controversial book, The Wild Anomaly/ and in this volume in a paper by Matheron and in a review of Negri by Manfred Walther); the significance of Spinoza's Marrano heritage (discussed in Yovel's book, Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Marrano of Reasongand in Negri, and in this volume in a paper by Yovel, as well as in Walther's review of Negri); and Spinoza's understanding of the physical world and of natural science (discussed in the Reidel collection, Spinoza and the Sciences ,S and in this volume in papers by Balibar and Wire Klever). Scholars at the convention were also reacting to the publication of Macherey's Hegel ou Spinoza4 (reviewed here by George Kline) and Bennett's A Study of Spinoza's Ethics5 (of which more anon). The second purpose of the conference was "to bring together the two worlds of Spinoza scholarship" (ix), the American and the Continental. What divides the two worlds? According to the editors, American commentators generally treat problems in Spinoza's metaphysics or philosophy of mind and use the Ethics...