Talk:Harry Austryn Wolfson

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What is New in Spinoza?

From Harry Austryn Wolfson's "The Philosophy of Spinoza"; 1934, Reprint edition 1983, ISBN: 0674665953; Vol 2: p. 331-2:

Novelty in philosophy is often a matter of daring rather than of invention. In thought, as in nature, there is no creation from absolute nothing, nor are there any leaps. Often what appears to be new and original is nothing but the establishment of a long-envisaged truth by the intrepidity of some one who dared to face the consequences of his reasoning. Now the long-envisaged truth which was established by the intrepidity and daring of Spinoza was the principle of the unity of nature, which in its double aspect meant the homogeneity of the material of which it is constituted and the uniformity of the laws by which it is dominated. But his predecessors, who formulated that principle and openly avowed it or rhapsodized about it, as a rule failed to adhere to it. To all of them there was a break somewhere in that unity. Man was believed by them to be, as Spinoza aptly puts it, an empire within an empire, and God, as he could have put it quite as aptly, a super-empire. The difficulty of maintaining this logical anomaly of asserting the uniformity of the laws of nature, on the one hand, while, on the other hand, asserting the autonomy of man within nature and the suzerainty of God over nature was keenly felt by them, but all they did toward overcoming this difficulty was to try to patch it up somehow, never daring to cross the boundaries set up by tradition. It was Spinoza who first dared to cross these boundaries, and by the skillful use of weapons accumulated in the arsenals of philosophy itself he succeeded in bringing both G-D and man under the universal rule of Nature and thus establishing its unity. In attempting, therefore, to sum up what is new in Spinoza, we shall describe his contributions as acts of daring {even for today}.

Summary of what is New in Spinoza

From Wolfson's "The Philosophy of Spinoza"; 1934, Reprint edition 1983, ISBN: 0674665953; Vol 1: p. xxvi

Four acts of daring in establishing long-envisaged principle of unity of Nature by pressing old arguments to their logical conclusion.

(1) Attribution of extension {pantheism} to G-D,
(2) Denial of design and purpose in G-D,
(3) Insistence upon the inseparability of soul from body,
(4) Elimination of freedom of the will from human actions.

Possible Fifth Daring

From Wolfson's "The Philosophy of Spinoza"; 1934, Reprint edition 1983, ISBN: 0674665953; Vol 2: p. 347.

It is the anthropomorphisms and anthropopathisms of the Scriptures, which theologians tried to explain away, just as much as the monotheism, which they were so eager to justify, that constitute, historically, the essential character of the Scriptural God, and it was for this reason that theologians throughout the ages tried to save as much of these anthropomorphisms and anthropopathisms as possible, even though sometimes what they succeeded in saving was only the empty sounds of words. By depriving G-D of this kind of life, by exploding even the fiction that such a kind of life was attributed to Him when words to that effect {in G-D} were used, by openly disclaiming the need of maintaining such a fiction, Spinoza broke away from the traditional theology and started a new kind of theology and a new kind of rationalization.

Had this breaking away from tradition been deliberately intended as such by Spinoza it could have been regarded as a fifth act of daring on his part. But Spinoza seems to have been under the delusion that he was merely spinning on the traditions of religion and that he was only seeing in a truer light that which others before him had seen, to use his own expression, "as if through a mist". The true nature of his new theology, however, was more accurately understood by others than by himself. The contemporaries of Spinoza, those theologians who openly attacked him in their writings, instinctively felt this departure, and hence they condemned him, ......

Yesselman 21:36, 18 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Middle name

Is his middle name a variation of the word "Austrian"? Or is it derived from his birthplace, Ostrin?Lestrade (talk) 16:40, 6 June 2008 (UTC)Lestrade[reply]