Spinoza: The Enduring Questions

M. Morgan Holmes teaches English at McGill University.

This volume of essays was compiled to honor the late David Savan, a
University of Toronto philosophy professor. Graeme Hunter’s warm
prefatory tribute sets the stage for a humane and searching inquiry into
the character and ideas of the Dutch philosopher Benedict Spinoza. An
essay by Savan is in fact the volume’s first. Analyzing Spinoza’s
“Mind-Eternity thesis,” Savan rereads the Ethics and finds, instead
of the commonly presumed confusion, that Spinoza advances a concept of
eternity based on a “new” manner of perceiving material entities. In
the following essay, however, James C. Morrison counters that, for
Spinoza, “a man is the unity of mind and body,” and therefore
individuals cannot be immortal because the body corrupts.

In what to my mind is the most engaging essay in the collection, Laura
Byrne contests the view held by Savan and several feminist theorists
that the Spinozan “good” resides in a notion of “receptivity”
based on human “connectedness.” Byrne usefully complicates matters
by showing how, for Spinoza, “[b]oth benevolence and the invidious
desire to thwart the enjoyment of others follow equally from the
imitation of emotion or our interconnectedness.” Despite some quibbles
that might be had with Byrne’s reading of Hobbes’s mechanistic
“restlessness,” her essay is a good example of the nuanced,
nondogmatic quality that characterizes the collection’s best
contributions. Not a volume for general readers, Spinoza will please
specialists in 17th-century thought because of its penetrating analyses
of complex topics.