Abstract

Alan Donagan has written frequently on Spinoza's metaphysics over the years but in this recent work he offers the reader "a study of Spinoza's mature philosophy as a whole." His principal intention is "to help philosophers who aspire to work out an adequate naturalism to learn from one of their greatest naturalist predecessors". For Donagan maintains that "Spinoza's seventeenth-century form of naturalism," which is not materialist, "does not fall short philosophically as today's varieties of [materialist] naturalism do". To examine Spinoza's teaching Donagan follows the precedent of Frederick Pollock and E. M. Curley who "paradoxically rescue Spinoza for the twentieth century by restoring him to the seventeenth". Central to Donagan's interpretation, therefore, is a reconstruction of Spinoza's thought in relation to his own time. And he particularly seeks to demonstrate that an appreciation of Spinoza's philosophy demands a realization of the extent to which he conferred such new meanings on traditional philosophic, scientific, or theological language as his naturalist purposes required.