Videos by Yitzhak Y . Melamed
In this paper I trace the development of Spinoza's attitude toward the concept of accidents, from... more In this paper I trace the development of Spinoza's attitude toward the concept of accidents, from its early acceptance in the works of the young Spinoza and the first drafts of the Ethics, till its banishment in his later works. I attempt to point out the original sin which brought about the accidents' fall from Spinoza's paradise. 220 views
Conversation with Dr. Yoram Stein at the Levisson Institute, Amsterdam
101 views
Long audio interview at Kan Tarbut - the Israeli Cultural Radio - on Spinoza, the Herem, and seve... more Long audio interview at Kan Tarbut - the Israeli Cultural Radio - on Spinoza, the Herem, and several other things. 18 views
Audio interview. Nov. 30th, 2021
48 views
Books by Yitzhak Y . Melamed
Commercial Press, 2024
In this book, Yitzhak Y. Melamed offers a new and systematic interpretation of the core of Spinoz... more In this book, Yitzhak Y. Melamed offers a new and systematic interpretation of the core of Spinoza’s metaphysics. In the first part of the book, he proposes a new reading of the metaphysics of substance in Spinoza. Against Curley's influential reading, he argues that for Spinoza modes both inhere in and are predicated of God. Using extensive textual evidence, he shows that Spinoza considered modes to be God's propria. Against the claim that it is a category mistake to consider things as properties, he argues that the distinction between things and properties has been thoroughly undermined both in the early modern period and in contemporary metaphysics (in bundle theories, and some versions of trope theory). He goes on to clarify Spinoza’s understanding of infinity, mereological relations, infinite modes, and the flow of finite things from God’s essence. In the second part of the book, Melamed relies on this interpretation of the substance-mode relation and the nature of infinite modes and puts forward two interrelated theses about the structure of the attribute of Thought and its overarching role in Spinoza's metaphysics. First, he shows that Spinoza had not one, but two independent doctrines of parallelism. The Ideas-Things Parallelism stipulates an isomorphism between the order of ideas in the attribute of Thought and the order of things in nature. The Inter-Attributes Parallelism establishes an isomorphism among the order of modes in each of the infinitely many attributes. He shows that these two doctrines are independent of each other and that each has different implications. Relying on this clarification of the doctrines of parallelism, Melamed develops his final main thesis. Here he argues that, for Spinoza, ideas have a multifaceted (in fact, infinitely faceted) structure that allows one and the same idea to represent the infinitely many modes which are parallel to it in the infinitely many attributes. Thought turns out to be coextensive with the whole of nature. Spinoza cannot embrace an idealist reduction of Extension to Thought because of his commitment to the conceptual separation of the attributes. Yet, within Spinoza's metaphysics, Thought clearly has primacy over the other attributes insofar as it is the only attribute which is as elaborate, as complex, and, in some senses, as powerful as God.
Modality: A History (Oxford Philosophical Concepts), 2024
Hippos, usually, don’t fly. But can they, or must they stay strolling on earth? Numbers don’t bar... more Hippos, usually, don’t fly. But can they, or must they stay strolling on earth? Numbers don’t bark, nor can they bark. God cannot create a stone he cannot lift. We cannot change the past, but is our future necessary? – Our language is saturated with modal verbs and notions, and we can hardly think without employing the notions of necessity and possibility. But what are necessity and possibility? (We are not (necessarily) trying to philosophize before noon, but simply attempt to account for our use of words so intimately familiar to us). What do we really mean when we pronounce these magical words: ‘possible,’ ‘necessary,’ ‘necessarily,’ ‘impossible,’ ‘can,’ ‘must’ and their like?
It is not that we are not familiar with the claim that a proposition is necessary just in case it is true in all possible-worlds, and possible just in case it is true in at least one possible-world. But, as we are sure you will understand, we cannot explain possibility by employing the notion of possible-worlds, on a pain of obvious circularity. Think for a moment of a creature, highly intelligent, who has no modal notions: what would she gain if you tell her that a “proposition is possible just in case it is true in some possible world”?
We are also familiar with the suggestion that conceivability is a guide for possibility, but – regardless of the numerous other problems this, indeed interesting, suggestion must address – it would seem bizarre if one were to explain possibility through conceivability. Think again about our highly intelligent creature who is not familiar with modal terms: what would she gain were we to tell her that to be possible is to be conceiv-able?
Oxford Handbook of Jewish Philosophy
At the very conclusion of the eleventh chapter of his Theological Political Treatise, Spinoza att... more At the very conclusion of the eleventh chapter of his Theological Political Treatise, Spinoza attempts to explain why Paul-whom Spinoza appreciated more than any other Biblical figure -integrated philosophy in his preaching, whereas it is (according to Spinoza) precisely this primordial sin of mixing philosophy and theology that is the cause of so many political and religious problems. Spinoza is willing to excuse Paul – at least in part – by pointing out the different audiences to which Paul, on the one hand, and the rest of the apostles, on the other, preached. While Paul preached to the gentiles, or the Greeks who were devoted to philosophy, the other apostles preached to “the Jews, the despisers of philosophy [reliqui autem, qui Judaeis praedicaverunt, philosophiae scilicet contemtoribus].” Thus, Paul’s willingness to use philosophy in his preaching was simply an accommodation to his audience, the gentiles, who were profoundly absorbed in philosophical discourse.
But why is Spinoza calling the Jews “the despisers of philosophy”?
Oxford University Press
Spinoza’s recognition of the unpredictable fortunes of individuals, explicable through the interp... more Spinoza’s recognition of the unpredictable fortunes of individuals, explicable through the interplay between their intrinsic natures and their susceptibility to external causes, informs his account of political success and – what for him is the same thing – political virtue. Thus, a state may thrive because it has a good constitution (an internal feature), or because it was fortunate not to be surrounded by powerful enemies. Normally, however, it is the combination of both luck and internal qualities that determines the fate of things. What is true about the fate of states holds equally of the fate of other types of individual, both human and non-human. In a sense, even the fate of a theory is determined by the interplay between its intrinsic virtues, and mere historical luck.
A quarter century ago, shortly after I began my graduate studies in philosophy at Yale, I started thinking about writing a dissertation on Spinoza’s philosophy. A good and caring friend in my graduate cohort advised me against the idea, which he believed was tantamount to “professional suicide” given the oddity of Spinoza’s thought. Indeed, the environment of analytic philosophy in the mid- and even late-1990s was not particularly auspicious for the academic study of Spinoza. Spinoza was – rightly – considered as having little commitment to commonsense, and commitment to commonsense – the most stubborn of prejudices – was (and still is) considered by many a minimal requirement for entry into the club of “decent” philosophers. Yet, things have changed over the past twenty-five years. So much so, that recently a (non-Spinozist) early modernist colleague of mine complained to me about the futility of changing the description of an event he planned from a ‘Spinoza workshop’ into an ‘early modern philosophy workshop,’ since “one way or another, most of the submitted abstracts are going to deal with Spinoza.” Indeed, in many ways, the interest and intensity of the study of Spinoza’s philosophy in the Anglo-American world has eclipsed that of almost all other early modern philosophers, and we seem to be facing a circumstance in which Spinoza is gradually competing with, if not replacing, Kant as the compass of modern philosophy. One can list many reasons for these dramatic developments: from Spinoza’s radical naturalism, to his dismissal of the fairytales of anthropomorphic and anthropocentric religion – while Kant on these issues could at best be said to kick the ghosts from the front door while inviting them back as ‘ideas’ or ‘postulates of practical reason’ through the back door –- to his unequivocal rejection of the illusions of humanism. Still, we lack a full explanation of the recent Spinozist upheaval in North American philosophy.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Spinozism has been blossoming for more than half a century. The synthesis of Spinoza and Marx, developed and advocated by Louis Althusser and his disciples, was a major catalyst for this development. Equally important were several groundbreaking studies – by Martial Gueroult, Alexandre Matheron, and perhaps also Gilles Deleuze – that came out around 1970. The methods of Gueroult, Matheron, and Deleuze were quite diverse, and it may well be that it was precisely the diversity of their approaches that contributed to the explosion of Spinoza studies in France toward the end of the century.
Perhaps more than any concentration within the history of early modern philosophy, the field of Spinoza scholarship today resembles a plush, proliferating forest, diversifying and developing every single day. My aim in this volume is to invite the reader to explore some recently charted paths in these woods, and hopefully also to forge some new trails. Our understanding of Spinoza today is, I believe, much better than it was half a century ago, but as one can expect (and hope), new knowledge brings about new questions, sometimes even deeper and more difficult questions. The further we make our way through the Spinozistic forest, the more we realize that some of the expressions and terms we often summarily and innocently adopt from Spinoza’s texts are not that clear at all. Understanding what precisely Spinoza meant by expressions such as ‘having nothing in common [nihil commune inter se habent],’ ‘are one and the same [unum et idem sunt]’, ‘expressing [exprimere]’, ‘involving [involvere],’ and ‘conceiving [concipere]’ is absolutely crucial for an adequate grasp of the very core of Spinoza’s metaphysics. Yet, satisfactory answers to these simple questions are quite elusive, and for the most part, still desiderata.
The majority of the twelve studies collected in this volume have been written and published over the last decade. A few were written just for this volume. The common methodological attitude that most, if not all, of these studies reflect is the commitment to a bottom-up reconstruction of Spinoza’s philosophy where Spinoza’s text is both the point of departure and the constant touchstone against which any interpretation must be evaluated. I hope that applying these constraints to my interpretation of Spinoza helps me mitigate the – perfectly natural – tendency to impose my own philosophical predilections on his texts. I have a very strong interest in the philosophical value and relevance of Spinoza’s claims, but a genuine critical philosophical dialogue with a past philosopher must strive first to let the text (of the past philosopher) speak in its own voice without imposing our preconceived opinions and intuitions. Assuming that my intuitions and Spinoza’s intuitions must be the same is both naïve and highly misleading (as one can frequently observe in attempts to impose on Spinoza views which appear to some interpreter as “natural”). Similarly, reducing Spinoza’s claims to those held by his contemporaries is risking the imposition of intuitions held by Spinoza’s contemporaries on Spinoza, whereas we have plenty of evidence that Spinoza considered himself an iconoclast (just have a look at his not-very-discreet critique, if not full dismissal, of both Bacon and Descartes in Ep. 2), while in turn his contemporaries considered his views as bizarre.
Blackwell Companion to Spinoza: An Introduction, 2021
The invitation to edit this volume came almost five years ago. At the time, I asked the Blackwell... more The invitation to edit this volume came almost five years ago. At the time, I asked the Blackwell editors to postpone this project by a few years, in order to create a healthy distance between this volume and the Oxford Handbook of Spinoza which came out in 2017. During this long period – about as long as three elephant pregnancies – I have worked with several Blackwell editors: Charlie Hamlyn, Marissa Koors, Rachel Greenberg, Manish Luthra, and Mohan Jayachandran, and I would like to thank each and every one of them for their trust, care, and support.
There are several substantial editorial decisions I wish to explain here briefly. To facilitate diversity (of gender, geography, philosophical tradition, and stage of career development), I have decided to commission a larger number of chapters. This decision has also allowed the Companion to cover topics which are rarely addressed in similar publications. Yet, insofar as the length of the entire Companion had to be restricted within certain reasonable limits, most of the chapters had to be concise. Moreover, in order to recruit top scholars – who are frequently not tempted to write mere summaries and textbook entries – I invited contributors to use their chapters to develop new ideas and cutting-edge research, rather than merely summarize existing scholarship. Thus, the contributors were placed – by me – in an uneasy and challenging situation: they were asked to provide a brief overview of their subject matter while presenting serious, original scholarship, all in a rather short space. While I do not wish to break the Talmudic rule that a “baker may not attest to the quality of his own loaf,” my personal feeling is that this challenge has been met even better than I could have hoped, and I would like to thank my collaborators in this volume for their immense investment, talent, and intellectual generosity.
The first complete and annotated English translation of Maimon’s influential and delightfully ent... more The first complete and annotated English translation of Maimon’s influential and delightfully entertaining memoir
Solomon Maimon's autobiography has delighted readers for more than two hundred years, from Goethe, Schiller, and George Eliot to Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt. The American poet and critic Adam Kirsch has named it one of the most crucial Jewish books of modern times. Here is the first complete and annotated English edition of this enduring and lively work.
Born into a down-on-its-luck provincial Jewish family in 1753, Maimon quickly distinguished himself as a prodigy in learning. Even as a young child, he chafed at the constraints of his Talmudic education and rabbinical training. He recounts how he sought stimulation in the Hasidic community and among students of the Kabbalah—and offers rare and often wickedly funny accounts of both. After a series of picaresque misadventures, Maimon reached Berlin, where he became part of the city's famed Jewish Enlightenment and achieved the philosophical education he so desperately wanted, winning acclaim for being the "sharpest" of Kant's critics, as Kant himself described him.
This new edition restores text cut from the abridged 1888 translation by J. Clark Murray, which has long been the only available English edition. Paul Reitter's translation is brilliantly sensitive to the subtleties of Maimon's prose while providing a fluid rendering that contemporary readers will enjoy, and is accompanied by an introduction and notes by Yitzhak Melamed and Abraham Socher that give invaluable insights into Maimon and his extraordinary life. The book also features an afterword by Gideon Freudenthal that provides an authoritative overview of Maimon's contribution to modern philosophy.
In this book, Yitzhak Y. Melamed offers a new and systematic interpretation of the core of Spinoz... more In this book, Yitzhak Y. Melamed offers a new and systematic interpretation of the core of Spinoza’s metaphysics. In the first part of the book, he proposes a new reading of the metaphysics of substance in Spinoza. Against Curley's influential reading, he argues that for Spinoza modes both inhere in and are predicated of God. Using extensive textual evidence, he shows that Spinoza considered modes to be God's propria. Against the claim that it is a category mistake to consider things as properties, he argues that the distinction between things and properties has been thoroughly undermined both in the early modern period and in contemporary metaphysics (in bundle theories, and some versions of trope theory). He goes on to clarify Spinoza’s understanding of infinity, mereological relations, infinite modes, and the flow of finite things from God’s essence. In the second part of the book, Melamed relies on this interpretation of the substance-mode relation and the nature of infinite modes and puts forward two interrelated theses about the structure of the attribute of Thought and its overarching role in Spinoza's metaphysics. First, he shows that Spinoza had not one, but two independent doctrines of parallelism. The Ideas-Things Parallelism stipulates an isomorphism between the order of ideas in the attribute of Thought and the order of things in nature. The Inter-Attributes Parallelism establishes an isomorphism among the order of modes in each of the infinitely many attributes. He shows that these two doctrines are independent of each other and that each has different implications. Relying on this clarification of the doctrines of parallelism, Melamed develops his final main thesis. Here he argues that, for Spinoza, ideas have a multifaceted (in fact, infinitely faceted) structure that allows one and the same idea to represent the infinitely many modes which are parallel to it in the infinitely many attributes. Thought turns out to be coextensive with the whole of nature. Spinoza cannot embrace an idealist reduction of Extension to Thought because of his commitment to the conceptual separation of the attributes. Yet, within Spinoza's metaphysics, Thought clearly has primacy over the other attributes insofar as it is the only attribute which is as elaborate, as complex, and, in some senses, as powerful as God.
Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise was published anonymously in 1670 and immediately provok... more Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise was published anonymously in 1670 and immediately provoked huge debate. Its main goal was to claim that the freedom of philosophizing can be allowed in a free republic and that it cannot be abolished without also destroying the peace and piety of that republic. Spinoza criticizes the traditional claims of revelation and offers a social contract theory in which he praises democracy as the most natural form of government. This Critical Guide to the Treatise presents new essays by well-known scholars in the field and covers a broad range of topics, including the political theory and the metaphysics of the work, religious toleration, the reception of the text by other early modern philosophers, and the relation of the text to Jewish thought.
Papers by Yitzhak Y . Melamed
Les Études Philosophiques
In a letter to Albert Burgh, a former friend and a recent convert to Catholicism, Spinoza writes:... more In a letter to Albert Burgh, a former friend and a recent convert to Catholicism, Spinoza writes:
I grant that the organization of the Roman Church, which you praise so highly, is well designed politically, and profitable for many. I do not believe there is any order more suitable for deceiving ordinary people [plebem] and controlling men’s minds, unless it would be the order of the Mahommedan Church [ordo Mahumedanæ Ecclesiæ], which surpasses it by far. For from the time this superstition began, no schism has arisen in their Church.
The letter, dated end of 1675 or beginning of 1676, expressed certain views about Islam, reminiscent of similar claims Spinoza made in his preface to the Theological-Political Treatise:
The Turks have succeeded so well at [establishing worship with utmost deference] that they consider it a sacrilege even to debate religion; they fill everyone’s judgment with so many prejudices that they leave no room in the mind for sound reason, nor even for doubting.
Undoubtedly, Spinoza shared many of the prejudices of his Christian, European contemporaries, but what is most striking in Spinoza’s claims here is his strong conviction that there were never any schisms in Islam, nor hardly any debates about religion. This seems to indicate that Spinoza knew virtually nothing about Islam, its history, or Islamic philosophy.
Currently, we have no evidence that Spinoza read any of the works of the major medieval Islamic philosophers. And yet, in a recent, excellent article, Stephen Ogden suggested that of all his predecessors, “Avicenna’s system quite possibly stands the closest to Spinoza’s own.” Surprising as it may seem, I can easily see the grounds for Ogden’s intriguing claim, and in the current article I will study Spinoza’s reception of the Avicennian Essence-Existence distinction, as well as the extent to which both philosophers were willing to grant to the Principle of Sufficient Reason (i.e., the demand that everything must have a cause and reason) unlimited validity.
There are several possible routes of transmission from Avicenna to Spinoza. Latin Avicennians had a decisive influence on late medieval and early modern metaphysical thought. Spinoza’s Hebrew sources -Maimonides, Crescas, and perhaps also Ibn Ezra and Ibn Daud - provide a different route of transmission. Still, much of this latter path will remain in the dark as long as we do not gain a clear picture of the works Spinoza studied in his early adulthood while still belonging to the Spanish-Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam. In the current article, I will set aside the question of the precise route of transmission, focusing instead on two of the philosophical questions at stake.
British Journal for the History of Philosophy
The few studies that address the economic dimensions of Spinoza's political philosophy tend to em... more The few studies that address the economic dimensions of Spinoza's political philosophy tend to emphasize his view of the ancient Hebrew polity at the time of the Bible as essentially egalitarian. We do not deny this important feature of Spinoza's reconstruction of the ancient Hebrew state. However, in the current study, we would like to shed light on a key economic argument of Spinoza's Theological Political Treatise that has been hardly discussed so far: Spinoza's contention that international economic collaboration cannot be pursued in a closed and xenophobic society, such as the ancient Hebrew state, under Spinoza's reconstruction. In the first part of this study, we provide a general characterization of Spinoza's reconstruction of the ancient Hebrew state and its unique virtues. In the second part, we discuss and evaluate Spinoza's portrayal of the ancient Hebrew state as essentially xenophobic. In the third and final part, we suggest that Spinoza used his portrayal of the ancient Hebrew state as essentially xenophobic in order to motivate his Dutch contemporaries to abandon their phantasies of imitating this legendary polity. Spinoza's argument was quite simple: in spite of the exceeding virtues of this stateand Spinoza does not hesitate to call it the "Kingdom of God"-the ancient Hebrew state cannot, and should not, be imitated by a modern society that is keen on achieving wealth through international trade. To put things bluntly, Spinoza presents his compatriots with a stark choice: either you can reestablish the ancient Kingdom of God or you can enjoy the benefits of your unprecedented wealth achieved through international trade. But you can't do both.
Aleph: Historical Studies in Science and Judaism (forthcoming)
Harry Wolfson’s celebrated two-volume study of Spinoza – The Philosophy of Spinoza: Unfolding the... more Harry Wolfson’s celebrated two-volume study of Spinoza – The Philosophy of Spinoza: Unfolding the Latent Process of His Reasoning – appeared in 1934 with Harvard University Press. The book originated in a series of five studies Wolfson published in the Chronicon Spinozanum between 1921 and 1926. In the Chronicon, Wolfson announced that the studies published in the journal are instalments from a planned larger work, to be titled: “Spinoza, the Last of the Mediaevals: A Study of the Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata in the light of a hypothetically constructed Ethica More Scholastico Rabbinicoque Demonstrata.” In the preface to the 1934 book, Wolfson notes that the original title “had to be abandoned, as it did not seem advisable to have the title begin with the word ‘Spinoza’”. Thus, whatever stylistic reasons motivated Wolfson to amend the title, he was clearly not withdrawing from his view of Spinoza’s Ethics as being “More Scholastico Rabbinicoque Demonstrata.”
thetorah.com, 2023
A unique law in its ancient Near Eastern context, commentators such as ibn Ezra, Maimonides, and ... more A unique law in its ancient Near Eastern context, commentators such as ibn Ezra, Maimonides, and Calvin, living in a world of normative slavery, debated its reason, and whether it was theological or ethical.
Blackwell Companion to Spinoza, 2021
The very first line of Spinoza's magnum opus, the Ethics, states the following surprising definit... more The very first line of Spinoza's magnum opus, the Ethics, states the following surprising definition: By cause of itself I understand that whose essence involves existence, or that whose nature cannot be conceived except as existing [Per causam sui intelligo id, cujus essentia involvit existentiam, sive id, cujus natura non potest concipi, nisi existens]. As we shall shortly see, for many of Spinoza's contemporaries and predecessors the very notion of causa sui was utterly absurd, akin to a Baron Munchausen attempting to lift himself above a river by pulling his hair up. How can a thing cause itself into existence, if before the causal activity, the cause did not exist at all? Indeed, in one of his earliest works, Spinoza himself claimed: "No thing, considered in itself, has in itself a cause enabling it to destroy itself (if it exists), or to make itself [te konnen maaken] (if it does not exist)" (KV II 26| I/110/14-16). Moreover, in other early works, Spinoza refers to God as an "uncreated thing" (TIE §97) or "uncreated substance" (CM II 1| I/237/20), and not as a cause-of-itself as in the Ethics. What made Spinoza desert the common, traditional, view of God as the uncaused
Institute of Arts & Ideas, 2023
Overcoming the dogma that metaphysics must be dogmatic – i.e., inadequately motivated, and obscur... more Overcoming the dogma that metaphysics must be dogmatic – i.e., inadequately motivated, and obscure – was one of the main challenges for the rehabilitation of Spinozism. To the extent that contemporary analytic metaphysics is open to philosophythat is precise yet bold, and to the extent that it not any longer captivated by blind obedience to common sense, Spinozism can and will flourish. But there is another dogma – one which is not unique to current Anglo-American philosophy – the overcoming of which is likely to result in an even more radical upheaval.
Humanism – in a nutshell, the view that humanity occupies a uniquely prominent place in nature (if it is part of nature at all), and that the human perspective should be justly considered as constituting the boundaries and structure of reality – has deep philosophical roots, going back as far as Protagoras’ dictum: “Man is the measure of all things: of those that are - that they are, and of the things that are not - that they are not.” Humanism dominated the mainstream of modern philosophy, both before and after the advent of secularization. Figures as diverse as Pico Della Mirandola, Descartes, Leibniz, Hegel, and Sartre pledged their allegiance to its tenets. In a sense, we are all humanists today: we believe in the miracle of free will (even if we do not believe in any other miracle), we adore human dignity as an innate determination of all humans (war criminals included), and we do our best to point out allegedly unique features of human beings – consciousness, self-consciousness, unity of the self, freedom, rationality, the ability to act morally, or whatever – features that may help us
justify our attitude toward other animals, as mere things. Our default humanism functions as a genuine ideology: for the most part it is invisible, seamless, and taken for granted, and one needs to train herself in defamiliarization in order to recognize the arbitrariness of these deep-seated convictions.
Advances in Modern Logic 13 , 2020
This paper is an excerpt from a larger project that aims to open a new pathway into Spinoza's Eth... more This paper is an excerpt from a larger project that aims to open a new pathway into Spinoza's Ethics by formally reconstructing an initial fragment of this text. The semantic backbone of the project is a custom-made Spinozian model theory that lays out some of the formal prerequisites for more fine-grained investigations into Spinoza's fundamental ontology and modal metaphysics. We implement Spinoza's theory of attributes using many-sorted models with a rich system of identity that allows us to clarify the puzzling status of such logical principles as the Substitution of Identicals and Transitivity of Identity in Spinoza's thought. The intensional structure of our Spinozian models also captures his proposal that states of affairs can be necessitated or excluded by the essences of particular things, an essence-relative modality that should be of interest to philosophers who have sought to rehabilitate the concept of essence in contemporary analytic metaphysics.
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Books by Yitzhak Y . Melamed
It is not that we are not familiar with the claim that a proposition is necessary just in case it is true in all possible-worlds, and possible just in case it is true in at least one possible-world. But, as we are sure you will understand, we cannot explain possibility by employing the notion of possible-worlds, on a pain of obvious circularity. Think for a moment of a creature, highly intelligent, who has no modal notions: what would she gain if you tell her that a “proposition is possible just in case it is true in some possible world”?
We are also familiar with the suggestion that conceivability is a guide for possibility, but – regardless of the numerous other problems this, indeed interesting, suggestion must address – it would seem bizarre if one were to explain possibility through conceivability. Think again about our highly intelligent creature who is not familiar with modal terms: what would she gain were we to tell her that to be possible is to be conceiv-able?
But why is Spinoza calling the Jews “the despisers of philosophy”?
A quarter century ago, shortly after I began my graduate studies in philosophy at Yale, I started thinking about writing a dissertation on Spinoza’s philosophy. A good and caring friend in my graduate cohort advised me against the idea, which he believed was tantamount to “professional suicide” given the oddity of Spinoza’s thought. Indeed, the environment of analytic philosophy in the mid- and even late-1990s was not particularly auspicious for the academic study of Spinoza. Spinoza was – rightly – considered as having little commitment to commonsense, and commitment to commonsense – the most stubborn of prejudices – was (and still is) considered by many a minimal requirement for entry into the club of “decent” philosophers. Yet, things have changed over the past twenty-five years. So much so, that recently a (non-Spinozist) early modernist colleague of mine complained to me about the futility of changing the description of an event he planned from a ‘Spinoza workshop’ into an ‘early modern philosophy workshop,’ since “one way or another, most of the submitted abstracts are going to deal with Spinoza.” Indeed, in many ways, the interest and intensity of the study of Spinoza’s philosophy in the Anglo-American world has eclipsed that of almost all other early modern philosophers, and we seem to be facing a circumstance in which Spinoza is gradually competing with, if not replacing, Kant as the compass of modern philosophy. One can list many reasons for these dramatic developments: from Spinoza’s radical naturalism, to his dismissal of the fairytales of anthropomorphic and anthropocentric religion – while Kant on these issues could at best be said to kick the ghosts from the front door while inviting them back as ‘ideas’ or ‘postulates of practical reason’ through the back door –- to his unequivocal rejection of the illusions of humanism. Still, we lack a full explanation of the recent Spinozist upheaval in North American philosophy.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Spinozism has been blossoming for more than half a century. The synthesis of Spinoza and Marx, developed and advocated by Louis Althusser and his disciples, was a major catalyst for this development. Equally important were several groundbreaking studies – by Martial Gueroult, Alexandre Matheron, and perhaps also Gilles Deleuze – that came out around 1970. The methods of Gueroult, Matheron, and Deleuze were quite diverse, and it may well be that it was precisely the diversity of their approaches that contributed to the explosion of Spinoza studies in France toward the end of the century.
Perhaps more than any concentration within the history of early modern philosophy, the field of Spinoza scholarship today resembles a plush, proliferating forest, diversifying and developing every single day. My aim in this volume is to invite the reader to explore some recently charted paths in these woods, and hopefully also to forge some new trails. Our understanding of Spinoza today is, I believe, much better than it was half a century ago, but as one can expect (and hope), new knowledge brings about new questions, sometimes even deeper and more difficult questions. The further we make our way through the Spinozistic forest, the more we realize that some of the expressions and terms we often summarily and innocently adopt from Spinoza’s texts are not that clear at all. Understanding what precisely Spinoza meant by expressions such as ‘having nothing in common [nihil commune inter se habent],’ ‘are one and the same [unum et idem sunt]’, ‘expressing [exprimere]’, ‘involving [involvere],’ and ‘conceiving [concipere]’ is absolutely crucial for an adequate grasp of the very core of Spinoza’s metaphysics. Yet, satisfactory answers to these simple questions are quite elusive, and for the most part, still desiderata.
The majority of the twelve studies collected in this volume have been written and published over the last decade. A few were written just for this volume. The common methodological attitude that most, if not all, of these studies reflect is the commitment to a bottom-up reconstruction of Spinoza’s philosophy where Spinoza’s text is both the point of departure and the constant touchstone against which any interpretation must be evaluated. I hope that applying these constraints to my interpretation of Spinoza helps me mitigate the – perfectly natural – tendency to impose my own philosophical predilections on his texts. I have a very strong interest in the philosophical value and relevance of Spinoza’s claims, but a genuine critical philosophical dialogue with a past philosopher must strive first to let the text (of the past philosopher) speak in its own voice without imposing our preconceived opinions and intuitions. Assuming that my intuitions and Spinoza’s intuitions must be the same is both naïve and highly misleading (as one can frequently observe in attempts to impose on Spinoza views which appear to some interpreter as “natural”). Similarly, reducing Spinoza’s claims to those held by his contemporaries is risking the imposition of intuitions held by Spinoza’s contemporaries on Spinoza, whereas we have plenty of evidence that Spinoza considered himself an iconoclast (just have a look at his not-very-discreet critique, if not full dismissal, of both Bacon and Descartes in Ep. 2), while in turn his contemporaries considered his views as bizarre.
There are several substantial editorial decisions I wish to explain here briefly. To facilitate diversity (of gender, geography, philosophical tradition, and stage of career development), I have decided to commission a larger number of chapters. This decision has also allowed the Companion to cover topics which are rarely addressed in similar publications. Yet, insofar as the length of the entire Companion had to be restricted within certain reasonable limits, most of the chapters had to be concise. Moreover, in order to recruit top scholars – who are frequently not tempted to write mere summaries and textbook entries – I invited contributors to use their chapters to develop new ideas and cutting-edge research, rather than merely summarize existing scholarship. Thus, the contributors were placed – by me – in an uneasy and challenging situation: they were asked to provide a brief overview of their subject matter while presenting serious, original scholarship, all in a rather short space. While I do not wish to break the Talmudic rule that a “baker may not attest to the quality of his own loaf,” my personal feeling is that this challenge has been met even better than I could have hoped, and I would like to thank my collaborators in this volume for their immense investment, talent, and intellectual generosity.
Solomon Maimon's autobiography has delighted readers for more than two hundred years, from Goethe, Schiller, and George Eliot to Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt. The American poet and critic Adam Kirsch has named it one of the most crucial Jewish books of modern times. Here is the first complete and annotated English edition of this enduring and lively work.
Born into a down-on-its-luck provincial Jewish family in 1753, Maimon quickly distinguished himself as a prodigy in learning. Even as a young child, he chafed at the constraints of his Talmudic education and rabbinical training. He recounts how he sought stimulation in the Hasidic community and among students of the Kabbalah—and offers rare and often wickedly funny accounts of both. After a series of picaresque misadventures, Maimon reached Berlin, where he became part of the city's famed Jewish Enlightenment and achieved the philosophical education he so desperately wanted, winning acclaim for being the "sharpest" of Kant's critics, as Kant himself described him.
This new edition restores text cut from the abridged 1888 translation by J. Clark Murray, which has long been the only available English edition. Paul Reitter's translation is brilliantly sensitive to the subtleties of Maimon's prose while providing a fluid rendering that contemporary readers will enjoy, and is accompanied by an introduction and notes by Yitzhak Melamed and Abraham Socher that give invaluable insights into Maimon and his extraordinary life. The book also features an afterword by Gideon Freudenthal that provides an authoritative overview of Maimon's contribution to modern philosophy.
Papers by Yitzhak Y . Melamed
I grant that the organization of the Roman Church, which you praise so highly, is well designed politically, and profitable for many. I do not believe there is any order more suitable for deceiving ordinary people [plebem] and controlling men’s minds, unless it would be the order of the Mahommedan Church [ordo Mahumedanæ Ecclesiæ], which surpasses it by far. For from the time this superstition began, no schism has arisen in their Church.
The letter, dated end of 1675 or beginning of 1676, expressed certain views about Islam, reminiscent of similar claims Spinoza made in his preface to the Theological-Political Treatise:
The Turks have succeeded so well at [establishing worship with utmost deference] that they consider it a sacrilege even to debate religion; they fill everyone’s judgment with so many prejudices that they leave no room in the mind for sound reason, nor even for doubting.
Undoubtedly, Spinoza shared many of the prejudices of his Christian, European contemporaries, but what is most striking in Spinoza’s claims here is his strong conviction that there were never any schisms in Islam, nor hardly any debates about religion. This seems to indicate that Spinoza knew virtually nothing about Islam, its history, or Islamic philosophy.
Currently, we have no evidence that Spinoza read any of the works of the major medieval Islamic philosophers. And yet, in a recent, excellent article, Stephen Ogden suggested that of all his predecessors, “Avicenna’s system quite possibly stands the closest to Spinoza’s own.” Surprising as it may seem, I can easily see the grounds for Ogden’s intriguing claim, and in the current article I will study Spinoza’s reception of the Avicennian Essence-Existence distinction, as well as the extent to which both philosophers were willing to grant to the Principle of Sufficient Reason (i.e., the demand that everything must have a cause and reason) unlimited validity.
There are several possible routes of transmission from Avicenna to Spinoza. Latin Avicennians had a decisive influence on late medieval and early modern metaphysical thought. Spinoza’s Hebrew sources -Maimonides, Crescas, and perhaps also Ibn Ezra and Ibn Daud - provide a different route of transmission. Still, much of this latter path will remain in the dark as long as we do not gain a clear picture of the works Spinoza studied in his early adulthood while still belonging to the Spanish-Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam. In the current article, I will set aside the question of the precise route of transmission, focusing instead on two of the philosophical questions at stake.
Humanism – in a nutshell, the view that humanity occupies a uniquely prominent place in nature (if it is part of nature at all), and that the human perspective should be justly considered as constituting the boundaries and structure of reality – has deep philosophical roots, going back as far as Protagoras’ dictum: “Man is the measure of all things: of those that are - that they are, and of the things that are not - that they are not.” Humanism dominated the mainstream of modern philosophy, both before and after the advent of secularization. Figures as diverse as Pico Della Mirandola, Descartes, Leibniz, Hegel, and Sartre pledged their allegiance to its tenets. In a sense, we are all humanists today: we believe in the miracle of free will (even if we do not believe in any other miracle), we adore human dignity as an innate determination of all humans (war criminals included), and we do our best to point out allegedly unique features of human beings – consciousness, self-consciousness, unity of the self, freedom, rationality, the ability to act morally, or whatever – features that may help us
justify our attitude toward other animals, as mere things. Our default humanism functions as a genuine ideology: for the most part it is invisible, seamless, and taken for granted, and one needs to train herself in defamiliarization in order to recognize the arbitrariness of these deep-seated convictions.