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Philosophy of Spinoza: Unfolding the Latent Process of His Reasoning

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Harry Austryn Wolfson's massive two-volume commentary on Baruch Spinoza was originally published in 1934, and it is still one of the best. It is certainly one of the most thorough: Wolfson leaves no stone unturned in his examination of what Spinoza said and what he meant by it.

Locating Spinoza on the cusp between the medieval and the modern worlds, he maintains that Spinoza is at once the last of the medievals and the first of the moderns. Tagging these two aspects of Spinoza's thought "Baruch" and "Benedictus," Wolfson argues that in order to understand what "Benedictus" says, it is necessary to reconstruct what has "passed through the mind of Baruch."

And that is just what Wolfson attempts to do. His work is a systematic and basically self-explanatory presentation of what Spinoza said and thought, with the _Ethics_ naturally taken as the central text in need of explication. With monumental thoroughness, Wolfson dissects Spinoza's writings on numerous matters of philosophy and theology and (most helpfully) compares his thought on many points with that of Moses Maimonides (whom Wolfson names as one of the three dominant influences on Spinoza's thought, the other two being Descartes and -- sometimes indirectly -- Aristotle). And in general, Wolfson's familiarity with relevant Jewish philosophical literature is a tremendous asset put to good use.

Wolfson concludes his examination with a chapter entitled, "What is New in Spinoza?" Here he argues that Spinoza undertook three "acts of daring" by way of repairing breaks within the unity and homogeneity of nature as conceived by his predecessors: he declared that God has the attribute of extension as well as of thought; he denied design and purpose in God; and he insisted on the complete inseparability of the soul from the body. That Spinoza thereby departed from the traditional theologies of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and what implications this departure has for Spinoza's rational theology, is the subject of the remainder of the closing chapter.

In portions of his work, Wolfson tends to rely on psychological rather than philosophical explanation in order to set out why Spinoza holds certain views. This is in some respects a defensible approach (and Wolfson, of course, does defend it). However, Wolfson's work should probably be supplemented by a good commentary on purely philosophical questions. It is too bad H.H. Joachim's _Study of the Ethics of Spinoza_ is no longer in print, for it fills the bill admirably.

Spinoza is difficult, there's no question about it. It is doubtful whether any philosopher really understands Spinoza. Wolfson, however, presents the most thorough account yet of Spinoza's reasoning. This is perhaps the most scholarly book on a single philosopher that I've come across. I am a philosophy major and am going to be a scholar in early modern philosophy. However, this book is a must for anyone who is really interested in Spinoza.I was very glad to find this book, even though it cost me an arm and a leg to get it.