Documenting Spinoza. A Bio-Bibliographical History of his Time. (original) (raw)

Abstract

"Towards a New Historical Context of Spinoza" Many key questions about Spinoza’s life, family, intellectual networks and his occupations still remain to be answered, ranging from his early entrepreneurship, his intellectual training and his erratic expulsion from the synagogue to his work as a performer of natural experiments and his practical skills as an optician. Summarised thus, a careful, systematic reassessment of the historical Spinoza with a view to producing a truly critical reconstruction of his life, immediate family, character, intellectual development, occupations, friends and networks, writings and earliest reception is urgently needed. Serving as a backbone and an instrument for international Spinoza scholarship, the present publication seeks to break new ground in entirely focusing on the historical facts and to give a complete and critical account of Spinoza’s life and times by disclosing and rendering available the documentary sources up to 1800. The main purpose of such a survey is to offer a deeper insight into and to contribute in finding an answer to many crucial questions about the multiplicity and diversity of Spinoza’s occupations, interests, agenda and contacts, as well as in the circulation of knowledge in the United Provinces and abroad. This, in turn, will further reveal the forces and processes that influenced Spinoza’s intellectual development as an original thinker in his own time. Such an interdisciplinary reconstruction of Spinoza’s life and time, combining the history of philosophy, philology, bibliography, palaeography, historiography and cultural history, I consider a backbone and indispensable for establishing a thorough historical context of the person and philosopher Benedictus de Spinoza. This new comprehensive historical context of Spinoza is in turn vital for a greater understanding of the tumultuous effect of the Dutch Enlightenment in Europe. The present chronology in this publication, modelled after the prominent chronologies of the lives of Leibniz, Husserl and Hobbes, aims at establishing a new comprehensive historical context of Spinoza by rendering available the documentary sources of his life, writings, intellectual networks and reception covering the time frame up to 1680. The study is organised in the following way. The first portion comprises the chronology of Spinoza’s life and times, starting with the birth of the philosopher’s father, Michael d’Espinosa, in 1587 or 1588 and ending in early 1679 with the official condemnation by the Roman Catholic Office of the Holy Inquisition of the philosopher’s Epistolae, the Ethica, the Tractatus theologico-politicus and the Tractatus politicus (Part 1). The documentary section of the study (Part 2) comprises the following sections: short biographies of key figures (Annex 1); a list of known business partners of the Amsterdam Espinosa trading firm, from 1627 to 1664 (Annex 2); a new critical inventory of Spinoza’s correspondence (26 August 1661–mid-October 1676), not only of the 88 surviving (published) letters, but also of 43 postulated letters that are evidently lost or dispersed (Annex 3); an annotated codicological list of surviving letters and the seventeenth and eighteenth-century manuscripts of his work (Annex 4); and a bibliography of primary and secondary sources, followed by a general index of names. Since there is no authoritative bibliography of Spinoza’s writings, Part 2 also provides a detailed bibliographical catalogue of surviving copies (749) of the earlier editions and (as the case may be) translations of his work, printed between 1663 and 1796 in libraries around the world (see Annex 4 (Sources), Surviving Copies of Editions and Translations of Spinoza’s Writings). A bibliography of primary and secondary sources completes this publication. The book, unveiling many new exciting documents and sources on Spinoza's life and times, is scheduled for 2015/2016 and will be published in English.

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