Workshop ‘The Spinoza Clan: An Afternoon with Spinoza’s Friends and Followers’
Regents of the Children's Orphanage in Haarlem" by Jan de Bray, 1663
Convened by Mogens Laerke (CNRS, IHRIM/MFO)
With the support of the NOTCOM ERC Project
In this workshop, we explore new aspects of the people, texts, and networks around the Dutch philosopher Benedict Spinoza (1632–1676). The workshop is organised by the ERC project NOTCOM on occasion of the visit of Dr. Maxime Rovere, author of Méthodes de Spinoza (CNRS Editions, 2010) and Le Clan Spinoza (Flammarion 2017), and translator of Spinoza, Correspondance (Garnier-Flammarion, 2010), Spinoza, Éthique (Flammarion, 2021), and Jarig Jellesz et Lodewijk Meyer. Spinoza par ses amis (Rivages, 2017).
Programme
2.00-2.15pm Introduction (Mogens Lærke)
2.15-3.15pm. Olivier Yasar de France (Pembroke College, Oxford): The Transnational Circulation of an Idea in the European Republic of Letters: The Curious Case of Vat. Lat. 12838.
A few years ago, a non-autograph manuscript of Benedict Spinoza’s Ethics was discovered in the Archives of the Vatican. Copied a couple of years before the philosopher's death, it is the only manuscript of his Ethica which has survived. It travelled with Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus as he undertook the intellectual grand tour of Europe which brought him from the United Provinces to London and Paris. What with all roads leading to Rome, the manuscript's peregrinations ended in the Vatican, where Nicolas Steno promptly committed it to the Index of the Inquisition. We hope to interpret the peregrinations of the Vatican Ethics in light of Benedict Spinoza's own philosophy. Indeed we submit that they embody the philosopher's own understanding of how ideas circulate in times of peace. The travels of the manuscript fashion the first layers of interpretation of the Ethics, before his most influential work has even seen the light of day. The travails of the manuscript will come to symbolize both the early politics of Spinoza's reception, and the later reception of Spinoza's politics. In so doing, they partake of the invention of a Spinozism without Spinoza. In short, Vat. Lat. 12838 has all the makings of a very singular palimpsest—one which both shapes and is shaped by the collective, political, European and transnational circulation of an idea across time.
3:15-4:15. Mogens Lærke (CNRS-IHRIM/MFO, Lyon/Oxford) : A Circle Without a Circle. Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus’s Natural Scientific Method
The first edition of Medicina mentis (1686/7), the principal philosophical work of Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus (1651–1708), was subtitled “an attempt at authentic logic wherein the method of discovering unknown truths is discussed.” In this paper, I am interested in the historical genesis and the systematic construction of this “art of discovery.” As a philosopher, Tschirnhaus is difficult to categorise, placed at the point of transition between different doctrines, schools, and epochs, a “heretic” of both Cartesianism and Spinozism, according to himself. One central instance of Tschirnhaus keeping a foot in several camps is this: on the one hand, he insisted that “true physics” (vera physica) has to be built from the ground up from a priori principles; on the other hand, he maintains that the conduct of “natural science” (scientia naturalis) has to be rooted in experience and experimental practices; he explicitly claimed to have found an “intermediary path” between these two approaches. In this paper, I am interested in the historical genesis and the systematic construction of this art of discovery, with particular emphasis on the way in which Tschirnhaus believed to have found such an “intermediary path.” I believe the ground-structure of Tschirnhaus’s art of discovery is best understood as the result of his complex engagement with in his intellectual development, especially some formative years around the mid- and late 1670s.
4.30-5.30pm Maxime Rovere (IHRIM, Lyon): Resisting Spinoza: Bouwmeester, Van den Enden and Kerckrinck’s Objections to Spinoza’s Intellectualism
A diffusionist bias sometimes makes scholars suppose that Spinoza’s group of friends was made of disciples, gathered around him to receive his teachings as a doctrine of truth. This presentation draws attention to a certain resistance which was explicitly offered by Spinoza’s friends concerning one of his doctrines, regarding the relation between imagination and intellect. More specifically, that resistance bears upon the role played by imagination in human salvation. In his early texts, from the very first up to the Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670), Spinoza tends to present the imagination as an incertain form of knowledge and as the source of all error, while the intellect alone appears to offer access to truth and science, as the only means of knowing God and experience salvation. However, in their early writings, the authors that historians consider to be closest to Spinoza made arguments going in the opposite direction. In the Philedonius (1657), Franciscus Van den Enden considered the possibility of anticipating the future with the help of imagination—for him, that faculty did not appear only in a disorderly state. In one of his letters (1666), Johannes Bouwmeester observes that, because imagination has a sovereign power from the point of view of knowledge, we should not consider it as an act of aimless thinking. In his contributions to the literary society Nil volentibus arduum, founded in 1669, he moreover suggests that it is possible to dispense with the intellect if we are dealing with the issue of salvation. Finally, in his Florilegium anatomicum (1670), Theodor Kerckrinck referred to the Paracelsian tradition to highlight the strength of the imagination in shaping the body, for better or for worse. I will argue see that these objections, or acts of resistance to Spinoza’s propositions, far from drawing a dividing line between Spinoza and his friends, offer us extraordinary examples of the malleable aspect of their ideas, as well as of a common intellectual evolution of friends who shared philosophical interests.
The event is funded by the European Research Council (NOTCOM, ERC AdG no. 101052433, 2023-2027). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the participants only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the ERC. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
