16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
It's two books in one!, December 13, 2002
I don't ordinarily like books that devote too much space to endnotes. For one thing, I hate having to flip to the back of the book to read the blinkin' things. For another, it just seems as though, if you have something important to say, you ought to be able to work it into your text.
But Edwin Curley's _Behind the Geomtrical Method_ is an exception. He's got his main text, and he's got his notes, and the notes are thirty pages long and filled with the sort of stuff you'd expect thirty pages of notes to be filled with. But he has excellent reasons for dividing his text as he does, and it actually works pretty well.
You see, what he wants to do on the one hand is provide a fairly accessible introduction to Spinoza's _Ethics_. That's not easy to do if you have to burden your text (and your reader) with lots and lots of technical philosophical argumentation. Plus he's developed his views a bit since 1969 (when he published _Spinoza's Metaphysics_) and he wants to update his own outlook.
But he needs _somewhere_ to put the technical argumentation, because his _other_ purpose is to disagree with practically every word Jonathan Bennett has written on this subject. Bennett is the author of the absolutely brilliant _A Study of Spinoza's Ethics_, a book of the very finest caliber that subjects Spinoza to the sort of close reading every philosopher should receive at least once. But there are problems with his account, and Curley (who also thinks highly of Bennett) wants to correct them.
Well, for the purposes of this review, we'll leave the two Spinoza scholars to their disagreement (which has essentially to do with how Spinoza thought modes were related to substances). But the reader who wants to see a philosophical debate conducted with panache and chivalry (not to mention wit) will enjoy following up on this exchange. (See _The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza_, edited by Don Garrett, for some more of it; further references are in its bibliography. And don't miss Richard Mason's _The God of Spinoza_ for a third point of view.)
At bottom what Curley wants to do is something Harry Austryn Wolfson attempted with not altogether satisfactory results, and Bennett doesn't even pretend to try: locate Spinoza in philosophical history, and make sense of his philosophy by understanding in context who and what he was responding to. (What two names belong on the shortlist? If you guessed Descartes and Hobbes, give yourself an A.) He does a nice job of this even though I have to disagree with some of his own interpretations of Spinoza. (He reads Spinoza as a naturalistic materialist.)
It's a nice commentary, and it's a good companion for a trek through the _Ethics_. If you're looking for such a thing, I'd probably recommend starting with Genevieve Lloyd's _Spinoza and the Ethics_, but don't forget to come back to this one.
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21 of 58 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Good introduction, but we don't need it., August 5, 2000
By A Customer
Edwin Curley is a typical anglo-saxon philosopher and his book is an elaborated text book introduction to Spinoza. He shows you the main arguments for Spinoza's claims without giving you much insight into what Spinoza intends by his ('God or Nature') thesis and the importance of his point. It will be an easy but quite futile and unrewarding reading. It is a good help to the newcoming student but is not what would be expected from some thirty years of study on the topic. I recommend that people take time to read the original ethics some number of times, go and study classical philosophers' texts like Aristotle and Aquinas, and then wait for life to distill in them the wisdom to understand Spinoza in truth. Do not go to second hand resources like these (you can read people like Deleuze on the topic(expressionism in philosophy) who is a philosopher in his own right) since it is questionable how these professors are superior to you. Philosophy begins by taking epistemic responsibility and I don't know how anyone teach that. You should trust your gut feelings as Spinoza did. You don't need Edwin Curley to teach that to you. You will need this book only to get good grades in an undergraduate course.
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