Spinoza on Ethics and Understanding

Peter Winch

Description

This volume unites Peter Winch’s previously unpublished work on Baruch de Spinoza. The primary source for the text is a series of seminars on Spinoza that Winch gave, first at the University of Swansea in 1982 and then at King’s College London in 1989. What emerges is an original interpretation of Spinoza’s work that demonstrates his continued relevance to contemporary issues in metaphysics, epistemology and ethics, and establishes connections to other philosophers - not only Spinoza’s predecessors such as René Descartes, but also important 20th Century philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Simone Weil. Alongside Winch's lectures, the volume contains an interpretive essay by David Cockburn, and an introduction by the editors.

Acknowledgements; Editors' Introduction; Winch, Spinoza and the Human Body, by David Cockburn; Note on the Text; Abbreviations; Spinoza: Ethics and Understanding; 1. Method and Judgement; 2. Substance and Attributes; 3. Negation, Limitation, and Modes; 4. Mind and Body; 5. The Emotions, Good and Evil; 6. The Life of Reason; Bibliography; Index.

Sujets

• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Modern history
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 06 novembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781785275456
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Peter Winch’s depth as a philosopher comes out in the depth of his engagement with Spinoza. Spinoza’s ethical concerns resonated with Winch’s own; and his lectures are wonderfully expressive of how he saw philosophy itself. Winch’s discussions of the complex relation between Descartes’s philosophy and that of Spinoza are among the most valuable features of this fine book.
– Cora Diamond, Kenan Professor of Philosophy Emerita, Department of Philosophy, University of Virginia

This volume deserves to be celebrated at several levels. It collects previously unpublished work on Baruch Spinoza by Peter Winch, one of the most important British philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. It offers an original interpretation of Spinoza, highlighting the enduring significance of Spinoza for current debates in metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. It places Spinoza’s thought in philosophical conversation not only with predecessors such as René Descartes, but also with Ludwig Wittgenstein and Simone Weil, whose thought was studied in depth by Winch in groundbreaking contributions.
– Maria Rosa Antognazza, Professor of Philosophy, King’s College London
Spinoza on Ethics and Understanding
Anthem Studies in Wittgenstein publishes new and classic works on Wittgenstein and Wittgensteinian philosophy. This book series aims to bring Wittgenstein’s thought into the mainstream by highlighting its relevance to twenty-first-century concerns. Titles include original monographs, themed edited volumes, forgotten classics, biographical works and books intended to introduce Wittgenstein to the general public. The series is published in association with the British Wittgenstein Society.
Anthem Studies in Wittgenstein sets out to put in place whatever measures may emerge as necessary in order to carry out the editorial selection process purely on merit and to counter bias on the basis of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation and other characteristics protected by law. These measures include subscribing to the British Philosophical Association/Society for Women in Philosophy (UK) Good Practice Scheme.
Series Editor
Constantine Sandis – University of Hertfordshire, UK
Spinoza on Ethics and Understanding
by Peter Winch
Edited by
Michael Campbell and Sarah Tropper
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2020
by ANTHEM PRESS
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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
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Copyright © By Peter Winch; Edited by Michael Campbell and Sarah Tropper 2020
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-543-2 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78527-543-7 (Hbk)
This title is also available as an e-book.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Editors’ Introduction
Winch, Spinoza and the Human Body, by David Cockburn
Note on the Text
List of Abbreviations
Chapter 1. Method and Judgement
Chapter 2. Substance and Attributes
Chapter 3. Negation, Limitation and Modes
Chapter 4. Mind and Body
Chapter 5. The Emotions, Good and Evil
Chapter 6. The Life of Reason
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
A number of people have helped with this project. David Cockburn generously lent us the audiotapes of Winch’s Swansea seminars and gave us permission to use them. He has also provided encouragement as well as helpful and detailed feedback on multiple drafts of the manuscript. Drew Johnson helped with the laborious process of transcribing the audio recordings of the seminars. He also helped search through the Peter Winch archives at King’s College London for relevant supplementary texts. We are grateful to the King’s College London archives for permission to use the Peter Winch archival material for background research. Among others who have provided useful feedback and support, we would like to mention Raimond Gaita, Lars Hertzberg, Lynette Reid and Christopher Winch. We are grateful to the Austrian Science Fund FWF (project P 29072 ‘Spinoza on the Concept of the Human Life Form’, led by Professor Ursula Renz) for providing financial support for Sarah Tropper. Michael Campbell’s work was supported by the Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value (registration No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/15_003/0000425), which is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund and the state budget of the Czech Republic (OP VVV/OP RDE). In addition, we would like to thank Constantine Sandis, Megan Greiving and the staff at Anthem Press for their enthusiasm for this project and their support.
Michael Campbell and Sarah Tropper
Editors’ Introduction
Michael Campbell and Sarah Tropper
Peter Winch was a British philosopher known for his work in the philosophy of social science and ethics, as well as for his interpretations of the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Simone Weil. But it is less well known that, throughout his career, Winch also engaged in various ways with Spinoza’s philosophy. He published two articles on Spinoza’s thought, one a critical notice of Jonathan Bennett’s book, A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics , 1 the other a discussion of the relation between mind and body in the Ethics . 2 Alongside this, in his other work Winch referred to Spinoza’s views, either in passing or as a foil, when discussing topics such as the nature of religious belief and the relationship between metaphysics and ethics. 3
Winch’s interpretation of Spinoza developed out of a close reading of the Ethics and De Emendatione , and he gave two sets of seminars on them; first at the University of Swansea in 1982 and then again at King’s College London in 1989. Despite the progress in Spinoza scholarship made since then, Winch’s reading remains worthy of consideration due to its idiosyncrasies both of style and content. His aim is not only to introduce his audience to Spinoza’s thought but also to encourage them to engage with this difficult material on their own terms. Winch finds three issues to be central to Spinoza’s philosophical concerns, namely, the position of man in relation to the universe; the inseparability of the theoretical and practical; and the relation of judgement, ideas and the world. This focus yields an engaging interpretation of Spinoza’s work, one that takes the ethical and metaphysical aspects of the Ethics to be inseparable, and which unifies them under the concept of the understanding. Winch expresses this conviction, in characteristically laconic fashion, at the beginning of the seminars:

Generalising, we can say that Spinoza’s enquiry has ethical, metaphysical and epistemological aspects, all internally related. Ethics presupposes both metaphysics and epistemology; the former, because the good life for men is something that requires understanding and the latter, because the nature of man and of the world and of the relation between them has to be understood. And metaphysics presupposes epistemology because we have to enquire what sort of understanding man is capable of and what sort of understanding it is possible to have of these particular kinds of questions. But epistemology presupposes metaphysics too, since understanding is itself a relation of man to the world and to himself, and we need to grasp the nature of the terms of this relation. 4
For Winch’s Spinoza, the characteristic mark of the human condition is that of vacillation. We are tossed one way and then another by our emotions, thereby passing judgements on things in a piecemeal fashion and without any surety that these evaluations can be finally justified by reference to a single, coherent outlook. Both in terms of what happens to us and how we react to it, we are at the mercy of forces that we do not understand. We call some things good and others evil as our inclination and attention dictates; we judge, condemn, blame, praise, extol, envy and admire, at different times and to varying degrees. Sometimes aware of the arbitrariness in this process we belatedly use reason to try to bring our scattershot evaluations under control. We appeal to this or that authority to justify ourselves, or we formulate some theory which we identify as our ‘moral outlook’, in the hope that by so doing we will bring stability, coherence and consistency to the results of our passing judgements. But a person’s commitment to any such outlook is only as stable as the emotional life which undergirds it, and her conformity to it is only as close as her ability to draw out the consequences of the doctrine in her life. We rationalise away some wrongdoings and fixate on others. We are selective about whom we forgive and how readily we do so. We do not hold ourselves to the same standards to which we hold others. In these and other ways we show that our evaluations are, despite our best efforts, unstable and inconsistent. The reason for this, Spinoza thinks, is that in evaluating things as good or bad we t