Episode 70: Susan James discusses Spinoza on the good embodied life
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Hello, and welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast recorded at the University of Chicago. I'm Matt Tykeman. And I'm Jamie Edwards. With us today is Susan James, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London. And she is here to discuss Spinoza on the good embodied life. Susan James, welcome. Thank you. So Benedict Espinoza is one of the most famous philosophers of the early modern era. Could you maybe tell us a bit about who he was and uh what are some of the topics he wrote about?
Sure I could. Spinoza lived in the middle part of the seventeenth century. He was born in Amsterdam. His parents were both immigrants from Portugal. They were Jews who came to the Jewish community in Amsterdam, which was one of the freest in Europe at the time. And so Spinoza grew up in the Jewish community there and went to the Jewish school and so forth. But in his early twenties, for reasons that we don't understand very well, but seem to have had something to do with his developing outrageous philosophical views, he was excommunicated from the synagogue. and the harem or curse which was pronounced on him was an unusually fierce and adamant one in the context. After this Spinoza seems to have just abandoned the Jewish community as far as we know, and began to live as a sort of independent scholar.
He learned Latin, he studied a much wider range of philosophical sources than he had previously done. And he learnt to grind lenses, which was sort of a serious professional and financial occupation for him, but at the same time was as it were a gentlemanly and interesting scientific occupation. This was the era when microscopes were just developing and lens grinding was a very big sort of technological and scientific project. So Spinoza, for example, ground lenses for some of the greatest Dutch scientists of his day, including Huygens. At the same time he began to write philosophical works. these early works were not published. The first work that he published was a study of Descartes' principles of philosophy.
Descartes had written his principles of philosophy in a sort of rather informal style, just explaining his points one by one in ordinary prose, and But there was a belief in this period that as well in order to show that something was really certain, you had to put it into what was known as geometrical order. You had to express it in the form used by Euclid in his elements as a series of proofs and demonstrations. And so Spinoza transforms part of Descartes' principles into geometrical order and also adds some philosophical Thoughts of his own, which are where we begin to get a flavour of his own developing metaphysical position. So that work is published and it's important I think that how Spinoza first becomes known is as a Cartesian, a Dutch Cartesian, a follower of Descartes, and this is a sort of politically sensitive thing to be in the Netherlands at this time.
Okay, so that's as it were the first thing. The second thing that Spinoza published was a completely different sort of work. which appeared much later in his life in the seventeen seventies, and this was called the Theologico Political Treatise. This was a response, I think, to Spinoza's belief that life in the Netherlands was becoming politically more dangerous. For people like him, that's to say, for radical philosophers who valued what was called the freedom to philosophize, And so you wrote a book directed against a particular conservative brand of Protestant Calvinism. which was to defend the view that philosophy and theology could coexist with one another without getting in each other's way. The theologians didn't have to worry about radical Cartesian philosophers who were developing views that they regarded as as it were not strictly biblical.
And the philosophers also didn't have to worry that they were trenching on the territory of the theologians.
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