Se abordan las tres cuestiones principales que aparecen en la correspondencia entre Tschirnhaus y Spinoza: la libertad; la producción de los cuerpos a partir del atributo extensión; la relación entre los modos del atributo pensamiento y los modos de los demás atributos. Se analizan las dificultades que Tschirnhaus detecta y el valor y alcance de las respuestas de Spinoza.

Scholars have considered that Spinoza’s difficulties in dealing with the objections raised by Tschirnhaus against his physical approaches were the spur that led the latter to dissociate himself from the former in the field of natural philosophy. The aim of this paper is, on the one hand, to refute this misjudgment and, on the other, to show that the cause of it lies in having dismissed a significant post-Cartesian current of thought, buried in oblivion by the triumph of Newtonian (...) mechanics, which intended to develop a physics in purely relational terms. In turn, this will allow us to read the physical proposals of Spinoza and Tschirnhaus as paradigmatic examples of this relational physics. (shrink)

In this chapter, I consider the largely overlooked influence of E. W. von Tschirnhaus' treatise on method, the Medicina mentis, on Wolff's early philosophical project (in both its conception and execution). As I argue, part of Tschirnhaus' importance for Wolff lies in the use he makes of principles gained from experience as a foundation for the scientific enterprise in the context of his broader philosophical rationalism. I will show that this lesson from Tschirnhaus runs through Wolff's earliest (...) philosophical discussions, and indeed continues to inform his major texts in logic and mathematics just before the publication of the German Metaphysics. In the end, my discussion has the effect of revealing Tschirnhaus to be an exceptionally important influence on Wolff's development, perhaps even as important (or so I suggest) as Leibniz. (shrink)

L'hypothèse formulée par Tschirnhaus avec la proposition d'une "medicina mentis" répond à la précise question de la notion de salut mental et de la nature pathologique de l'erreur; l'ars inveniendi résoud dans la philosophie de Tschirnhaus le problème de la sagesse par le lien veriîas - delectatio sur la même ligne spinoziènne de la correspondance entre Bien et Plaisir. On recherche ainsi la nature du lien entre Plaisir et Perfection chez Tschirnhaus et Spinoza, en dédiant un espace (...) au rôle de la propriété imaginative dans l'élaboration des lois morales, ainsi qu' à l'importance de la différence entre l'éveil et le sommeil qui mettent en question une philosophie vouée à une longue préparation à la mort pour une notion de vie liée au thème de la delectatio, de l'activité à mesure du faire politique. (shrink)

Dogmatic Metaphysics and Tschirnhaus's M ethodology MARTIN SCHONFELD ACCORDING TO STANDARD COMMENTARIES, Tschirnhaus's main work, Medicina mentis, ~ supposedly furnished the methodological basis for the Leibnizian-Wolffian metaphysics. ~ Christian Wolff and his disciples, at any rate, preferred to think so. Wolff taught classes on Tschirnhaus and claimed that he had developed his own tenets on the basis of Tschirnhaus's ideas; Johann Christoph Gottsched praised the Medicina mentis as the basic methodology of the Wolffian enlightenment.3 Mirroring these (...) views, W. Wundt and H. J. de Vleeschauwer saw in Tschirnhaus the inventor of the "geometric method" adopted by the School Philosophers.4 According to M. ' Medicina Mentis, sive Tentamen genuinae Logicae, in qua disseritur de Methodo detegendi incoKaitas veritates, Amsterdam, 1687. Second and revised edition, Medicina Mentis, sive Artis inveniendi Praecepta generalia, Leipzig, 1695. ~For example, cf. Wilhelm Windelband, Geschichte der Philosophie, 3~o-33 and 356; Friedrich Ueberweg, Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, III: ~95-97, 3 x~ 34o-43; A. Robert Caponigri, A History of Western Philosophy (Notre Dame/London: University of Notre Dame.. (shrink)

Did it all begin with Tschirnhaus? This paper discusses the exemplary role that Tschirnhaus could play in the reconstruction of an empirically oriented, scientific, somewhat radical and variously unorthodox current in 18th-century German philosophy, starting from 18th-century characterizations of his intellectual image.

Abstract.The aim of this paper is to examine the work of Tschirnhaus, La Hire and Leibniz on the theory of caustics, a subject whose history is closely linked to geometrical optics. The curves in question were examined by the most eminent mathematicians of the 17th century such as Huygens, Barrow and Newton and were subsequently studied analytically from the time of Tschirnhaus until the 19th century.Leibniz was interested in caustics and the subject probably inspired him in his discovery (...) of the concept of envelopes of lines. (shrink)

Con anterioridad a la paz de Westfalia el espacio filosófico alemán había estado dominado en gran medida por la teosofía, especialmente en el ámbito protestante y en regiones como Sajonia, Silesia y Württemberg. Con la Medicina mentis de E. W. von Tschirnhaus, noble sajón de estudios universitarios en Leiden, donde entra en contacto con Spinoza y su círculo, entramos en un nuevo mundo conceptual. Bajo la apariencia de una propuesta metodológica, de corte cartesiano, de conducir la razón al descubrimiento (...) de cuanto es posible conocer por la ‘luz natural’, Tschirnhaus propone una reforma moral del sujeto humano capaz de procurarle la perfección, la felicidad y la unión con Dios, donde la impronta de Spinoza es fuerte, aunque en ningún momento son nombrados estos dos filósofos. Tras estudiar la acusación de spinozismo por Christian Thomasius y el rechazo de la imputación por Tschirnhaus, el artículo se pronuncia sobre el sentido y función de ese rechazo. (shrink)

A correspondência de Espinosa com Tschimhaus,` iniciada pouco antes da publicação do Tratado teológico-político e terminada alguns meses antes da morte do filósofo, é de marcada importância não só por conter os últimos escritos de Espinosa, mas sobretudo porque nela alguns dos temas mais importantes de sua filosofia são discutidos - nas primeiras, a relação entre necessidade e liberdade; nas seguintes, a distinção entre idéia verdadeira e adequada; nas últimas, o infinito atual, a possibilidade da exposição geométrica da metafísica e (...) de uma física a priori. Neste ensaio, mencionaremos a presença implícita de Leibniz nas últimas cartas de Tschirnhaus, mas trataremos apenas da primeira troca de cartas, cujo assunto é a divergência entre Tschirnhaus e Espinosa no tocante à liberdade. (shrink)

La nota ofrece algunas precisiones sobre el Catálogo de la Biblioteca de Tschirnhaus, impreso en 1723 y publicado en un número anterior de esta revista, a partir de la comparación con el Catálogo manuscrito de la misma, levantado en 1709, pocos meses después de la muerte de Tschirnhaus. El Catálogo manuscrito tampoco registra la presencia de las _Opera_ de Spinoza. Sin embargo, la presencia en este Catálogo de una obra, también ausente del Catálogo impreso (el infamado _Homo politicus, (...) hoc est: Consiliarus novus, officiarius et aulicus, secundum hodiernam Praxin_, escrito por Philipp Andreas Oldenburger, un autor criticado por Spinoza y su círculo y sobre el cual Pieter Van Gent había escrito a Tschirnhaus remitiendo a las _Opera posthuma_ de Spinoza), permite acreditar la hipótesis más plausible de que el volumen de las _Opera _de Spinoza, así como del _Homo politicus_, desaparecieran de la biblioteca y no fueran recogidos en el Catálogo por su carácter de obras 'infames'. (shrink)

Durante su intercambio epistolar con Spinoza, Tschirnhaus defiende la imposibilidad de deducir la naturaleza de los cuerpos particulares a partir de la sola extensión. El motivo de esta objeción reside en su dificultad para desmarcarse de la concepción sustancial de los cuerpos como partes finitas de la extensión sostenida por Descartes. Esta dificultad inicial, sin embargo, queda ensombrecida por la intervención de Leibniz en un momento clave de la correspondencia que convertirá la disputa de carácter físico en una controversia (...) teológica. Este artículo demuestra que el problema metafísico detectado por Leibniz consiste en la afirmación radical del principio de plenitud contenida en la proposición 16 de la primera parte de la Ética y las consecuencias heréticas que de ésta se desprenden. El examen del papel que la crítica de Leibniz jugó en el desarrollo de la discusión permitirá leer bajo una nueva luz tanto la paradójica actitud de Tschirnhaus como las enigmáticas y elusivas respuestas de Spinoza. (shrink)

En el presente artículo se argumenta que la Medicina mentis de E. W. von Tschirnhaus participa del alejamiento respecto a la Metafísica escolástica ejemplificado tanto por la Logica vetus et nova de Johannes Clauberg de modo moderado y conciliador como por la Einleitung zur Vernunft-Lehre de Christian Thomasius con mayor radicalidad. Para ello, el artículo consta de tres partes. En la primera, se bosqueja el proceso por el que la Schulmetaphysik adquiere presencia y relevancia en las universidades germanas del (...) siglo XVII. A continuación, se analizan las mencionadas obras de Clauberg y Thomasius para descubrir en qué medida ambos pensadores dialogan críticamente con la tradición susodicha. Finalmente, se culmina el trabajo con una reflexión sobre los vínculos existentes entre la obra de Tschirnhaus y las Lógicas de Clauberg y Thomasius. (shrink)

En 1723, quince años después de la muerte de Tschirnhaus, se publicó en Görlitz un Catálogo de su Biblioteca, que el 23 de agosto y días sucesivos iba a ser subastada al mejor postor. Ignoramos quién se hizo con ella y cuál fue su destino. Miguel Á. Granada encontró una mención de ese catálogo en un artículo de E. Winter y finalmente pudo localizar el Catálogo en la Sächsische Landesbibliothek –Staats– und Universitätsbibliothek de Dresde, donde se ofrece una copia (...) digitalizada del ejemplar conservado en la Biblioteca Albertina de Leipzig. Comentado el descubrimiento con Pablo Montosa, ambos coincideron en la importancia del Catálogo para la mejor evaluación de la cultura subyacente a la Medicina mentis y para la historia intelectual de Tschirnhaus. Dada la parquedad de los registros de las obras en el Catálogo, se hizo ver de inmediato la necesidad de proceder a la identificación y registro bibliográfico completo de los títulos del Catálogo, empresa que acometió Pablo Montosa con la ayuda puntual de Miguel Á. Granada. Ofrecemos al lector el resultado de esta tarea minuciosa en una transcripción del Catálogo que no ha conseguido identificar y describir todos los títulos, pero sí la gran mayoría y desde luego los más importantes. (shrink)

L'on montre: 1) que l'affirmation tschirnhausienne selon laquelle l'art de découvrir transforme notre nature en une nature quasi surhumaine qui semble assez participer de celle de Dieu, et en laquelle C. Thomasius avait subodoré un fort relent spinoziste, est explicable, et est effectivement expliquée par Tschirnhaus dans sa Medicina mentis, d'une façon qui ne saurait effaroucher un théologien orthodoxe; 2) que, malgré la modernité de certaines vues de Tschirnhaus relatives au rôle de l'expérience, cet auteur n'a pas perçu (...) la véritable fonction de la „confirmation" expérimentale, contrairement à ce qu'on admet fréquemment de nos jours; 3) pourquoi il convient de penser que c'est dans Spinoza que Tschirnhaus a puisé sa conception des définitions génétiques; 4) que, contrairement à l'opinion courante, ie manuscrit de la Mediana mentis a vraisemblablement été envoyé en Hollande en latin . Suivent des indications bibliographiques et un erratum. (shrink)

La Medicina mentis de Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus est un ouvrage singulier dans le panorama de la fin du xviie siècle et l’attention des chercheurs a été souvent retenue par l’influence qu’ont exercé sur elle Spinoza, d’abord, mais aussi Descartes et Leibniz. L’amitié et la relation épistolaire entre Tschirnhaus et Spinoza ont porté à reconnaître, dès la parution de la Medicina mentis, plusieurs caractères de la pensée de l’auteur de l’Ethica more geometrico demonstrata. D’autre part,...

The main objective of the paper is to give initial answers to three important questions. Why did Leibniz visit Spinoza? Why did his preparation for this meeting include a modification of the ontological proof of God? What is the philosophical result of the meeting and what do possible worlds have to do with it? In order to provide answers, three closely related manuscripts by Leibniz from November 1676 have been compared and the slow conceptual change of his philosophical apparatus has (...) been analyzed. The last of these manuscripts was presented and read in front of Spinoza. Around that time Leibniz abandoned the idea of plurality of worlds (cf. Tschirnhaus) and instead proposed the idea of possible worlds, thus introducing possibility into the (onto/theo)logical structure itself in order to avoid the “precipice” of Spinoza’s necessity. What is interesting, however, is how exactly this conceptual change occurred at the end of 1676 and what its philosophical and methodological implications are. (shrink)

Attraverso i dubbi che Tschirnhaus rivolge a Spinoza circa l’impercettibilità degli attributi e la distinzione dell'essenza dell'intelletto divino con l'essenza dell'intelletto umano, il presente saggio si propone di studiare il rapporto fra totalità e parte e il senso dell’immanenza nell’ontologia spinoziana, con particolare attenzione alla diade implicazione-esplicazione che ne permette il funzionamento. La comunanza formale propria dell’immanenza, la quale fonda l’implicazione e l’esplicazione, risulta il concetto chiave per comprendere a un tempo lo statuto sinfonico dell’universo modale, in cui ogni (...) cosa singolare richiama l'altra e il tutto, e il delicato empirismo che costituisce il terzo genere di conoscenza. (shrink)

The treatise of E.W. von Tschirnhaus «Medicina mentis»… is discussed in this article in the context of formation of Kant’s transcendental criticism. The study of theoretical sources of Tschirnhaus’s epistemology shows that, despite the strong influence of Spinoza and Leibniz, Tschirnhaus is closer to the Cartesian tradition. Trying to eliminate the metaphysical back-grounds from philosophy, he brings together empirical and rationalist traditions as close as possible. Such «critical convergence» results in the «subjective turn» that leads to Kant's (...) transcendental idealism. (shrink)

CONTENTS: -/- SEZIONE I IL TUTTO E' UNO? IL RISVEGLIO DI UN PROBLEMA TRA SCOLASTICA E RINASCIMENTO Il principio omne causatum est compositum fra Tommaso e Cajetano Igor Agostini, p. 25 Parti e tutto in Montaigne. La natura e l'individuo tra frammentazione e integrazione Raffaele Carbone 45 Le minuzzarie e il tutto. Giordano bruno e la conoscenza universale Maurizio Cambi 75 -/- SEZIONE II A PARTIRE DA CARTESIO. COME PUO' ESSERE UN TUTTO L'UOMO? -/- Mente/Corpo in Cartesio. Spunti per un'interpretazione (...) mereologica Stefano Di Bella 93 Nos sumus ex Deo et pertinemus ad Deum. Appartenenza, dipendenza e relazione nel pensiero e nel lessico di Arnold Guelincx Cristina Santinelli 115 L'integrità di corpo e mente nell'"invenire" terapeutico di E. W. von Tschirnhaus Manuela Sanna 133 L'indivisibilità della natura umana e della società in Francesco Longano. Un episodio della ricezione di Locke in Italia Roberto Evangelista 147 -/- SEZIONE III L'IRROMPERE DELL'ORGANICO. LA BIOLOGIA FILOSOFICA TRA SEI E SETTECENTO -/- Convenienza e discrepanza. Parti e tutto nella Lettera 32 di Baruch Spinoza Francesco Toto 169 Mereologia della sostanza e mereologia del vivente in Leibniz Enrico Pasini 197 Teleologia e mereologia dell’organismo da Leibniz a Bonnet Francesco Piro 209 Il nesso delle parti: mereologia e scienza secondo Christian Wolff Matteo Favaretti Camposampiero 239 Il problema del tutto e delle parti. il caso del vitalismo di Montpellier Charles T. Wolfe 257 -/- SEZIONE 4 TOTALITA' CRITICHE: DALLA CRISI DEL NATURALISMO ILLUMINISTICO ALLA FILOSOFIA DELLE CULTURE -/- La logica del tutto (e delle parti di tutto, vale a dire niente) in Dom Deschamps Jean-Claude Bourdin 273 l’(in)afferabile forma. Totalità e contingenza nel pensiero di Kant tra Critica della ragion pura e Critica del giudizio Luigi Imperato 303 la relazione Parte-Tutto nel primo Schelling Giuseppe D’Anna 327 Hegel o della totalizzazione dello spazio di interiorità Vittorio Morfino 343 A partire da Kant: Begriffsbiìldung teleologica e relazione Parti-Tutto nelle indagini di Rickert sulla logica delle scienze storiche della cultura Edoardo Massimilla 359 . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.4 (2003) 560-561 [Access article in PDF] Olli Koistinen and John Biro, editors. Spinoza: Metaphysical Themes. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. x + 255. Cloth, $49.95. Writing in the mid-seventeenth century, Spinoza tried to provide conceptual foundations for the newly developing "natural philosophy" of his day. His monism, naturalism, and theory of mind are still intriguing today, but they are notoriously (...) difficult to understand. There is little interpretive consensus with regard to even the most basic concepts and claims. In Spinoza: Metaphysical Themes the diversity of interpretive perspective is vividly on display.All of the eleven essays in this collection are published here for the first time. They cover a broad range of topics and, taken together, they move us forward in our understanding of Spinoza's basic doctrines. Most of the essays are carefully argued discussions of clearly defined issues of interpretation. They address matters that are central to the system and central to our understanding of the system—monism, causation, individuation, conatus.The editors' Introduction claims that Jonathan Bennett's 1986 work set a new standard of Spinoza scholarship—a standard that the essays in this volume seek to measure up to. Most (not all) of these essays do indeed come close to Bennett's commendable level of argumentative clarity and rigor. And here, as in Bennett's work, the emphasis is mostly systematic and argumentative, not historical.The collection opens with a very good essay by Michael Della Rocca entitled "Spinoza's Substance Monism." This essay applies to the thorny issue of substance monism the same argumentative strategy that Della Rocca has elsewhere applied to monism regarding individual modes—i.e., to the claim that an extended mode and the idea of that mode are identical. The argument turns on the complete conceptual independence of the attributes, and Della Rocca makes a strong case for the centrality of that somewhat puzzling doctrine. John Carriero's contribution ("Monism in Spinoza") continues the focus on monism, but from a different perspective. Carriero asks, "Why does Spinoza hold that finite... bodies [End Page 560] are not substances?" (47). Rejecting two traditional responses he provides a plausible answer to this good question by focusing on an early exchange of letters between Spinoza and Oldenburg and upon Spinoza's rethinking of Descartes's conception of extension.One of the most interesting essays is Don Garrett's interpretive discussion of Spinoza's derivation of the conatus doctrine at Ethics3p4-3p6 ("Spinoza's Conatus Argument"). Commentators have identified various putative fallacies in the argument that Spinoza offers for this doctrine—chiefly fallacies of equivocation. Garrett develops an interesting and plausible notion of "inherence" that casts light on a number of central metaphysical relations and permits a defensible reading of the conatus argument. For the serious Spinoza scholar, this one essay is worth the price of the volume.Olli Koistinen's "Causation in Spinoza" considers Spinoza's solution to the difficulty of causal interaction between substances—a glaring problem in Descartes that provoked glaringly problematic solutions from Malebranche and Leibniz. Richard Manning's essay addresses a controversial point in Jonathan Bennett's interpretation. The issue is whether, in Spinoza's system, mental content can have causal significance—a point closely related to the important issue of teleological explanation of human behavior. Manning supports a kind of "thoughtful teleology," making a convincing case for the causal efficacy of mental content.On the whole the authors in this volume restrict their discussion of secondary literature to the works of fellow Anglophones. One finds occasional mention of Gueroult, but the Continental literature on Spinoza is mostly ignored. There are two notable exceptions to this rule. Steven Barbone ("What Counts as an Individual for Spinoza?") discusses the thorny issue of modal individuation in Spinoza's system, arguing against Matheron's 1969 claim that for Spinoza the state is an individual. Emphasizing the centrality of power, Barbone draws important (liberal) political conclusions from his analysis of individuation. Mark Kulstad ("Leibniz, Spinoza and Tschirnhaus: Metaphysics à Trois, 1675-1676") fruitfully uses recent Continental work on... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Vatican Manuscript of Spinoza’s EthicaSteven NadlerLeen Spruit and Pina Totaro. The Vatican Manuscript of Spinoza’s Ethica. Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, 205. Brill’s Texts and Sources in Intellectual History, 11. Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2011. Pp. vi + 318. Cloth, $136.00.By any measure, it is a remarkable find. There was a small codex in the Vatican Library, marked Vat. Lat. 12838. It originally belonged to the Congregation of the (...) Holy Office, which in 1917 inherited the role of keeper of the Index of Prohibited Books. The codex had been transferred to the Library with other materials in 1922. The manuscript, originally acquired in 1677, bore no author’s name. According to the card catalogue it is a Tractatus theologiae, a five-part “Theological Treatise.” Its contents are described as follows: Pars prima de Deo: Definitiones. / 1. Per causam. / Des. Tam difficilia quam rara sunt.Sound familiar?We possess no autograph manuscripts of Spinoza’s philosophical writings (there are a couple of autographs of his letters). And the only philosophical manuscripts we do have are the two Dutch manuscripts of the Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being, both discovered in the nineteenth century but one of which almost certainly was composed in Spinoza’s lifetime from a Latin original. Thus, to discover a seventeenth-century Latin manuscript copy of the Ethics, even if it is not an autograph, is exciting news indeed. Since it was in the Vatican’s possession by September 1677, we know that it was written out while Spinoza (who had died only a few months earlier) was still alive; it may also be that, while the manuscript is not by Spinoza’s hand, he did look it over.What makes this last possibility even more likely is the fact that, as Leen Spruit and Pina Totaro—the discoverers of the manuscript—argue in their introduction to this volume, the manuscript may originally have belonged to a member of Spinoza’s circle of friends in Amsterdam, Walter Ehrefried von Tschirnhaus. Tschirnhaus was in Paris by 1676, and had in his possession a copy of the Ethics (which a suspicious Spinoza famously told him not to show to Leibniz, who was also in Paris at the time and wanted to have a look at the work). Tschirnhaus was in Rome within a year, where, Spruit and Totaro suggest, he may have made the acquaintance of Niels Stensen, erstwhile Lutheran scientist and friend of Spinoza, now a fervent Catholic convert and anti-Spinozist soon to be appointed Vicar Apostolic of Nordic Missions. Tschirnhaus, or possibly some other “Lutheran foreigner” (in Stensen’s words) to whom he, eager to spread the good word of Spinozism, had given the manuscript, passed it on to Stensen, who in turn handed it over to the Roman Inquisition, along with a denunciation of its author. Stensen’s intention was to have Spinoza condemned by the Church and his works placed on the Index. Spruit and Totaro also claim—on the basis of the handwriting—that the copyist of this manuscript is Pieter van Gent, a member of Spinoza’s circle who played a role in the posthumous publication of his works.While Spruit and Totaro wisely admit that this story behind the manuscript “cannot be established with certainty,” they also say that it is “rather likely.” Their plausible hypothetical reconstruction of the history of the manuscript and of its relationship to the publication history of the Ethics, as well as their account of other important contextual elements, is based on careful and informed scholarship, and makes for fascinating reading.As for the manuscript itself, it is not a revolutionary discovery (as, say, the discovery of the Short Treatise manuscripts were). It will not affect the reading of the Ethics in any major way. There are a variety of discrepancies between the Vatican manuscript and the text of the Ethics in the Opera Posthuma (OP) of 1678: differences in spelling, “rather insignificant” omissions and additions of words and phrases, probable scribal errors, changes in word order, and some noticeable differences in expression. To take just one nonetheless interesting example, the final clause of the... (shrink)

Spinoza’s Letter 66 is written in response to a question raised by Tschirnhaus. The question is why does one’s mind in one attribute perceive only one’s body in another if one’s nature is expressed in modes of infinite attributes? Spinoza replies that “although each thing is expressed in infinite modes in the infinite intellect of God, the infinite ideas by which it is expressed cannot constitute one and the same mind of a singular thing,” and he contends that these (...) “infinite ideas” constitute “an infinity of minds” or independent conceptions in God’s understanding. (shrink)

Einleitend wird über die vielfältigen Vorteile wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens im Alter geschrieben. Die fünf Aufsätze des Buches widmen sich Randbereichen philosophischen Denkens. Auf dem Lande war vom 16. bis zum 19. Jahrhundert von Akademikern nur der Pfarrer gefragt, statt der akademisch gebildeten Mediziner nutzte man die aus dem Handwerk (z.B. Bader) herkommenden "Volksmediziner". Ebenso Astrologie und Alchemie. Die Dorfschullehrer hatten ebenfalls keine akademische Ausbildung. Über Philipp Melanchthon gibt es eine Vielzahl von Literatur. Sein Verhältnis zu den verschiedenen Richtungen der Häretiker, so (...) zu den Täufern, den Unitariern, zu Sebastian Franck und Caspar von Schwenckfeld ist bislang aber weniger behandelt. Auch der Chiliasmus des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts ist gleich Utopie, Apokalyptik, Messianismus oder Eschatologie in Deutschland relativ selten philosophisches Arbeitsgebiet. Das gilt auch für Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus, Christian Weise und Johann Jakob von Hartig, "drei Glanzlichter der Oberlausitz". Bei Moses Mendelssohn wird vornehmlich seine Toleranzposition von 1782 dargelegt, dabei Toleranz und Intoleranz auch in Staat und Kirche bestimmt"--Back cover. (shrink)

François Lamy, a Benedictine monk and Cartesian philosopher whose extensive relations with Arnauld, Bossuet, Fénélon, and Malebranche put him into contact with the intellectual elite of late-seventeenth-century France, authored the very first detailed and explicit refutation of Spinoza’s Ethics in French, Le nouvel athéisme renversé. Regrettably overlooked in the secondary literature on Spinoza, Lamy is an interesting figure in his own right, and his anti-Spinozist work sheds important light on Cartesian assumptions that inform the earliest phase of Spinoza’s critical reception (...) in the seventeenth-century. I begin by presenting Lamy’s life and the contentious state of Spinoza’s French reception in the 1680 and 1690s. I then discuss a central argument in Lamy’s refutation, namely the Cartesian objection that Spinoza’s account of the conceptual independence of attributes is incompatible with the theory of substance monism. Contrasting Lamy’s objection with questions put to Spinoza by de Vries and Tschirnhaus, I maintain that by exhibiting the direction Spinoza’s views on substance and attribute took in maturing we may accurately assess the strength of Spinoza’s position vis-à-vis his Cartesian objector, and I argue that, in fact, Spinoza’s mature account of God as an expressive ens realissimum is not vulnerable to Lamy’s criticism. In conclusion, I turn to Lamy’s objection that Spinoza’s philosophy is question-begging in view of Spinoza’s account of God, and I exhibit what this point of criticism tells us about the intentions of the first French Cartesian rebuttal of the Ethics. (shrink)

Gravity was a major theme in the seventeenth century scientific discussion. Trendsetters in the renewal of natural science were Galilei and Descartes. The first required a unified theory of all phenomena of gravity ; the second provided one with his vortex-hypothesis, which explained gravity by the mechanical push of subtile bodies of the vortex. This conception was tested and generally followed by Christiaan Huygens, whereas Newton presented the laws of the so called 'attraction' by which he did not at all (...) indicate the causes of those laws of motion. Spinoza comes on the scene of polemics as a critical Cartesian. Motion (of which downward motion of heavy bodies is only one instance) was explained by Descartes, but not so the rest of bodies or the equilibrium in the power relation between opposite forces, neither the reason why in some cases the particles form a hard body. Full fledged mechanism and consistent determinism lead Spinoza to account for rest and solidity in the same way, namely by means of the pressure of small and mostly unvisible bodies in the whirling environment. This paradoxical law was acknowledged as a real and important contribution to physical science by the Dutch spinozistic Cartesians Cuffeler and Overkamp, by the mathematician De Volder, by Spinoza's younger friend Tschirnhaus and in France by Malebranche. By the end of the century it was quite normal to speak about „the gravity of the air” and to consider the gravity of gross bodies as an illusion. (shrink)

W.N.Α. Klever's claim that he has discovered new Spinoza texts is unfounded in every respect. The seventeenth-century manuscript annotations in a copy of Spinoza's Opera posthuma, kept in Leiden University Library (shelf mark 755 F 32), do not originate in the circle of Spinoza's friends, nor do they contain any material that derives from the philosopher himself. They are an intelligent reader's comments, and as such they constitute an important document of the immediate reception of Spinoza's philosophy. Sofar, the author (...) has not been identified. It was certainly not Spinoza's correspondent E.W. von Tschirnhaus, and Klever's attempt to attribute the annotations to Tschirnhaus is a dismal failure: the four arguments adduced to substantiate this claim are altogether spurious. (shrink)

Despite the importance of Leibniz's mature philosophy, his early work has been relatively neglected. This collection begins with an overview of his formative years and includes 12 original papers by internationally-known scholars. The contributions reflect the wide range of the young Leibniz's philosophical interests and his interests in related subjects, including law, physics and theology. Some chapters explore his relationship to other philosophers, including his teachers in Leipzig and Jena and his Paris friend Tschirnhaus, as well as Hobbes and (...) Spinoza. Others focus on particular periods or texts and deal with themes ranging from ethics and free-will to his philosophically-significant account of transubstantiation and his early monadology. Some of the topics are familiar to Leibniz students - harmony, sufficient reason and possible worlds, for instance - but others are less familiar - for instance, his attitude to historical truth, millenarianism and the relation of mathematics to the natural world. The book provides an introduction to Leibniz's early philosophy and throws light on the development of some of the doctrines with which he is particularly associated. (shrink)

This essay considers Spinoza’s responses to two questions: what is responsible for the variety in the physical world and by what mechanism do finite bodies causally interact? I begin by elucidating Spinoza’s solution to the problem of variety by considering his comments on Cartesian physics in an epistolary exchange with Tschirnhaus late in Spinoza’s life. I go on to reconstruct Spinoza’s unique account of causation among finite bodies by considering Leibniz’s attack on the Spinozist explanation of variety. It turns (...) out that Spinoza’s explanations of the variety of bodies, on the one hand, and of causation among finite bodies, on the other, generate a tension in his system that can only be resolved by taking Spinoza to employ two notions of “existence.” I conclude by offering evidence that this is in fact what Spinoza does. (shrink)

In this paper, I suggest an outline of a new interpretation of core issues in Spinoza’s metaphysics and philosophy of mind. I argue for three major theses. (1) In the first part of the paper I show that the celebrated Spinozistic doctrine commonly termed “the doctrine of parallelism” is in fact a confusion of two separate and independent doctrines of parallelism. Hence, I argue that our current understanding of Spinoza’s metaphysics and philosophy of mind is fundamentally flawed. (2) The clarification (...) and setting apart of the two doctrines will also put us in a position to present my second major thesis and address one of the more interesting and enduring problems in Spinoza’s metaphysics: how can the attribute of thought be, on the one hand, isomorphic with any other attribute, and yet, on the other hand, be isomorphic with God himself, who has infinitely many attributes? In the second part of the paper, I present Spinoza’s solution to this problem. I argue that the number and order of modes is the same in all attributes. Yet, modes of Thought, unlike modes of any other attribute, have an infinitely-faceted internal structure so that one and the same idea represents infinitely many modes by having infinitely many facets (or aspects). (3) This new understanding of the inner structure of ideas in Spinoza will lead us to my third thesis in which I explain and solve another old riddle in Spinoza’s metaphysics: his insistence on the impossibility of the human mind knowing any of God’s infinite attributes other than Thought and Extension. In the third part, I show some of the major ramifications of my new interpretation and respond to some important objections. In my conclusion I discuss the philosophical importance of my interpretation. I explain why Spinoza could not embrace reductive idealism in spite of the preeminence he grants to the attribute of Thought. I argue that Spinoza is a dualist -- not a mind-body dualist, as he is commonly conceived to be, but rather a dualist of Thought and Being. Finally, I suggest that Spinoza’s position on the mind-body issue breaks with the traditional categories and ways of addressing the subject by suggesting a view which grants clear primacy to Thought without accepting any idealist reduction of bodies to thought. (shrink)

In his groundbreaking work of 1969, Spinoza's Metaphysics: An Essay in Interpretation, Edwin Curley attacked the traditional understanding of the substance-mode relation in Spinoza, according to which modes inhere in substance. Curley argued that such an interpretation generates insurmountable problems, as had already been claimed by Pierre Bayle in his famous Dictionary entry on Spinoza. Instead of having modes inhere in substance Curley suggested that the modes’ dependence upon substance should be interpreted in terms of (efficient) causation, i.e., as committing (...) Spinoza to nothing over and above the claim that substance is the (efficient) cause of the modes. These bold and fascinating claims generated one of the most important scholarly controversies in Spinoza scholarship of the past thirty-five years. In this paper I argue against Curley’s interpretation and attempt to reestablish the traditional understanding of Spinozistic modes as inhering in God and as predicated of God. I also criticize Curley’s philosophical motivation for suggesting this interpretation. In order to show that, for Spinoza, modes are predicated of - and inhere in - substance, I will proceed in the following manner. First, I will summarize Curley’s arguments against substance-mode inherence and present his alternative interpretation of the substance-mode relation. I will then present what I consider to be the most compelling arguments against Curley’s interpretation. Some of these arguments have already been suggested in the literature of the past thirty years (and by Bayle); however, as far as I know, most of the arguments I will be making are new. In the subsequent section I will respond to objections that Curley and Bayle advance against Spinoza’s view of God as the substratum in which all things inhere. Finally, I will address whether Spinozistic modes are predicated of (and not only inhere in) substance, and whether Spinoza considered modes to be particular properties (or “tropes,” in the jargon of contemporary metaphysics). Since Bayle’s claims will be used both in support of and against Curley’s interpretation, it would be appropriate to say a few introductory words on Bayle’s stance. In his Spinoza entry, Bayle criticizes Spinoza’s claim that all things are modes of God, claiming that it “is the most monstrous hypothesis that could be imagined, the most absurd, and the most diametrically opposed to the most evident notions of our mind.” Bayle, however, has no doubt that when Spinoza claims that all things are modes of God, Spinoza means that all things inhere in God. Curley embraces Bayle’s arguments against Spinoza, but uses them in order to claim that we should not ascribe to Spinoza a view which is allegedly shown by Bayle to be absurd. What we should do, Curley argues, is to reinterpret the substance-mode relation as a relation of causal dependence, which would set Spinoza free from Bayle’s hook. Interestingly, as we shall soon see, Bayle himself discusses and rejects a very similar revisionary interpretation of the substance-mode relation. (shrink)

The paper (an ample reworking of a 2005 Italian paper) tries to evaluate Leibniz’s enduring fascination with Spinoza and presents an overview in five stages of the development of his complex relationship to his thought, beginning with the time of Mainz, when Leibniz shows a strange urgency to get in epistolary contact with the author of the Theologico-Political Treatise, despite his public rejection of both the work and the author; then Leibniz’s stay in Paris, especially in the year 1675, when (...) he seeks information through Tschirnhaus on Spinoza’s clandestine doctrines; their personal meeting in the Hague, towards the end of the year 1676, and the subsequent distancing of Leibniz from Spinozism; the reading by Leibniz of Spinoza’s Opera Posthuma and the extension of his arguments against Spinozism to discredit Cartesian philosophy in general, and, finally, Leibniz’s retrospective evaluation of Spinoza’s thought in the Theodicy. (shrink)

Urban Gottfried Bucher is one of the most surprising authors in early German enlightenment and has been rightly celebrated as a materialist and therefore radical thinker. But he did not teach the same kind of materialism as his contemporary Andreas Rüdiger who leaned toward Locke’s empiricism. Bucher is much closer to Hobbes’ mechanical materialism, to Spinoza’s criticism of free will, and to Tschirnhaus’ extending of the mathematical method to natural science. His explanation of the working of the human soul, (...) while materialistic, is rationalistic and mechanical. The difference between the two kinds of materialism becomes crystal-clear in Bucher’s and Rüdiger’s approach to the Copernican system they both embrace. For Rüdiger, the Copernican hypothesis is seen as a probable truth we can hold on to as long as we don’t obtain competing empirical sensiones and ideas, even if our globe should not really move around the sun. For Bucher though, it is a demonstrated truth that gains additional support by a machin... (shrink)

El dossier sobre Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus, su obra y su tiempo que presentamos recoge algunas de las ponencias que se presentaron y discutieron en las sesiones de un Seminario que sobre «Tschirnhaus y la Medicina mentis» se desarrolló en la Facultad de Filosofía de la Universidad de Barcelona en febrero de 2020. El Seminario, organizado por Pablo Montosa y Guillem Sales, continuaba una investigación sobre la obra de este filósofo y científico alemán que ambos habían iniciado tiempo (...) atrás y que habían presentado en una comunicación al V Congrés Català de Filosofía, ahora publicada con el título de «La crítica de E. W. von Tschirnhaus a la identificació cartesiana de consciència i coneixement» en las Actas de dicho congreso. (shrink)