Abstract

The thesis of this work is that Spinoza's great originality was in methodology, and indeed, that he was "primarily a methodologist." Since the explicit theme of Spinoza's major works is politics and ethics, support for this thesis would require at a minimum an account of the relation of method to ethics, metaphysics and mechanistic physics. Not only is such an account wanting, but even while taking the Ethics as his primary text, the author dismisses as "irrelevant" its ostensible geometrical method. Further, while "all Spinoza's thinking can be called mathematical," barely two pages are devoted to an exposition of his "mathematical method" per se. The thesis then can hardly be said to have been presented, much less sustained.—H. C.