Spinoza’s Epistemology through a Geometrical Lens PDF Download

Author: Matthew Homan
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030767396
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
This book interrogates the ontology of mathematical entities in Spinoza as a basis for addressing a wide range of interpretive issues in Spinoza’s epistemology—from his antiskepticism and philosophy of science to the nature and scope of reason and intuitive knowledge and the intellectual love of God. Going against recent trends in Spinoza scholarship, and drawing on various sources, including Spinoza’s engagements with optical theory and physics, Matthew Homan argues for a realist interpretation of geometrical figures in Spinoza; illustrates their role in a Spinozan hypothetico-deductive scientific method; and develops Spinoza’s mathematical examples to better illuminate the three kinds of knowledge. The result is a portrait of Spinoza’s epistemology as sanguine and distinctive yet at home in the new Cartesian and Galilean scientific-philosophical paradigm.

Author: Matthew Homan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783030767402
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"Spinoza's Epistemology through a Geometrical Lens is a thrilling and distinctive study of Spinoza's epistemology. It's also a major study of Spinoza's relationship to the unfolding scientific revolution. In particular, Homan reopens and deepens the debate over Spinoza's ambivalent relationship to mathematization of nature by the mathematical sciences. In so doing he offers an elegant re-reading of Spinoza as a systematic philosopher. Homan's book will be of great interest to Spinozists and scholars of early modern philosophy, historians of science, philosophers of mathematics and epistemologists, especially those interested in affective ways of knowing." -Eric Schliesser, Professor of Political Science, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands "Matthew Homan has convinced me to reconsider my frequent exhortation against reading Spinoza as a Cartesian. Homan peels back thick and complicated layers in Spinoza's understanding and use of mathematical properties and geometric figures in science to reveal deep insights and controversial interpretations of Spinoza's epistemology and important connections and even bridges to his metaphysical project. Spinoza's Epistemology through a Geometrical Lens contributes to and even redirects many important ongoing discussions in scholarship on Spinoza." -Christopher Martin, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Toledo, USA This book interrogates the ontology of mathematical entities in Spinoza as a basis for addressing a wide range of interpretive issues in Spinoza's epistemology-from his antiskepticism and philosophy of science to the nature and scope of reason and intuitive knowledge and the intellectual love of God. Going against recent trends in Spinoza scholarship, and drawing on various sources, including Spinoza's engagements with optical theory and physics, Matthew Homan argues for a realist interpretation of geometrical figures in Spinoza; illustrates their role in a Spinozan hypothetico-deductive scientific method; and develops Spinoza's mathematical examples to better illuminate the three kinds of knowledge. The result is a portrait of Spinoza's epistemology as sanguine and distinctive yet at home in the new Cartesian and Galilean scientific-philosophical paradigm. Matthew Homan is Senior Lecturer of Philosophy at Christopher Newport University, USA.

Author: Edwin Curley
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691214263
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
This book is the fruit of twenty-five years of study of Spinoza by the editor and translator of a new and widely acclaimed edition of Spinoza's collected works. Based on three lectures delivered at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1984, the work provides a useful focal point for continued discussion of the relationship between Descartes and Spinoza, while also serving as a readable and relatively brief but substantial introduction to the Ethics for students. Behind the Geometrical Method is actually two books in one. The first is Edwin Curley's text, which explains Spinoza's masterwork to readers who have little background in philosophy. This text will prove a boon to those who have tried to read the Ethics, but have been baffled by the geometrical style in which it is written. Here Professor Curley undertakes to show how the central claims of the Ethics arose out of critical reflection on the philosophies of Spinoza's two great predecessors, Descartes and Hobbes. The second book, whose argument is conducted in the notes to the text, attempts to support further the often controversial interpretations offered in the text and to carry on a dialogue with recent commentators on Spinoza. The author aligns himself with those who interpret Spinoza naturalistically and materialistically.

Author: Rainer E. Zimmermann
Publisher: Isce Publishing
ISBN: 9780984216512
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description
The context within which Spinoza once developed his theory has clearly changed. However, most of Spinoza's general approach to conceptualizing the world can still be utilized, albeit with a slight change in terminology. Spinoza's approach has many advantages as compared with the approaches of his contemporaries, such as Descartes and Leibniz. Conceptualization today also requires taking fields such as physics and mathematics explicitly into account. This is very much in the sense of Spinoza's original intention that led him to speak in his main work of an ethics to be proved in geometrical order (which actually means: according to mathematical methods). This book is about a mathematical machinery which, is based on a strict logical structure, as well as on a not so strict hermeneutic structure - and is even representable in terms of algebraic expressions of a considerable symbolic quality. Eventually, this may be capable of shedding a completely new light on the ancient problem of the relationship between human beings and the rest of nature. As the book shows, the theory of evolutionary systems is a prime candidate for a conceptualization that might be useful in order to concretely develop this new insight.

Author: Benedictus De 1632-1677 Spinoza
Publisher: Wentworth Press
ISBN: 9781362382690
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Author: Steven Nadler
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139454315
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
Spinoza's Ethics is one of the most remarkable, important, and difficult books in the history of philosophy: a treatise simultaneously on metaphysics, knowledge, philosophical psychology, moral philosophy, and political philosophy. It presents, in Spinoza's famous 'geometric method', his radical views on God, Nature, the human being, and happiness. In this wide-ranging 2006 introduction to the work, Steven Nadler explains the doctrines and arguments of the Ethics, and shows why Spinoza's endlessly fascinating ideas may have been so troubling to his contemporaries, as well as why they are still highly relevant today. He also examines the philosophical background to Spinoza's thought and the dialogues in which Spinoza was engaged - with his contemporaries (including Descartes and Hobbes), with ancient thinkers (especially the Stoics), and with his Jewish rationalist forebears. His book is written for the student reader but will also be of interest to specialists in early modern philosophy.

Author: Benedict de Spinoza
Publisher: CreateSpace
ISBN: 9781507672327
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
The Ethics (Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata) by Benedict de Spinoza COMPLETE ENGLISH TRANSLATION Translated from the Latin by R. H. M. Elwes Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order (Latin: Ethica, ordine geometrico demonstrata), usually known as the Ethics, is a philosophical treatise written by Benedict de Spinoza. It was first published in 1677. The book closely resembles Euclid's Elements. At the beginning of Part 1, Spinoza defines key terms and lists axioms. On the basis of these and other definitions and axioms provided in the remaining four parts of the book, Spinoza offers proofs of hundreds of propositions and corollaries, such as "When the Mind imagines its own lack of power, it is saddened by it", "A free man thinks of nothing less than of death", and "The human Mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the Body, but something of it remains which is eternal." The impersonal style is frequently interrupted by stretches of informal and at times pugnacious prose, criticizing the views of philosophers such as René Descartes. The first part of the book addresses the relationship between God and the universe. Tradition held that God exists outside of the universe, created it for a reason, and could have created a different universe if he so chose. Spinoza denies each point. According to Spinoza, God is the natural world. As with many of Spinoza's claims, what this means is a matter of dispute. Spinoza claims that the things that make up the universe, including human beings, are God's "modes". This means that we and everything else are, in some sense, dependent upon God. The nature of this dependence is disputed. Some scholars say that the modes are properties of God in the traditional sense. Others say that modes are effects of God. Either way, the modes are also logically dependent on God's essence, in this sense: everything that happens follows from the nature of God, just like how (as Spinoza puts it) it follows from the nature of a triangle that its angles are equal to two right angles. Since God had to exist with the nature he happens to have, nothing that has happened could have been avoided, and if a particular fate for a particular mode is fixed by God, there is no escaping it, or as Spinoza puts it, "A thing which has been determined by God to produce an effect cannot render itself undetermined." God's creation of the universe is not a decision, much less one motivated by a purpose.

Author: Benedictus de Spinoza
Publisher: CreateSpace
ISBN: 9781470087432
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
The Ethics is a book by the philosopher Benedict de Spinoza. Spinoza's friends published it after his death, in 1677. The work is notable, not only because it presents radically new theories across a range of fields -- metaphysics, theology, psychology, and ethics -- but also for the unusually rigorous approach it takes to defending them. Much of the book is written, in the style of Euclid's Elements of Geometry, as a series of geometrical proofs of numerous philosophical points, accompanied by definitions, axioms, demonstrations, and corollaries, as well as intervening stretches of friendlier prose (scholia). The opening page of Spinoza's magnum opus, Ethics The book is divided into five parts. Each begins with a glossary of key concepts and a list of axioms. The titles for each part are taken from Edwin Curley's standard translation of Ethics into English.

Author: Nadeem Najeeb Naimy
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Author: Ursula Renz
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190886412
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
This book reconstructs Spinoza's theory of the human mind against the backdrop of the twofold notion that subjective experience is explainable and that its successful explanation is of ethical relevance, because it makes us wiser, freer, and happier. Doing so, the book defends a realist rationalist interpretation of Spinoza's approach which does not entail commitment to an ontological reduction of subjective experience to mere intelligibility. In contrast to a long-standing tradition of Hegelian reading of Spinoza's Ethics, it thus defends the notion that the experience of finite subjects is fully real.