Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise

Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise was published anonymously in 1670 and immediately provoked huge debate. Its main goal was to claim that the freedom of philosophizing can be allowed in a free republic and that it cannot be abolished without also destroying the peace and piety of that republic. Spinoza criticizes the traditional claims of revelation and offers a social contract theory in which he praises democracy as the most natural form of government. This Critical Guide to the Treatise presents new essays by well-known scholars in the field and covers a broad range of topics, including the political theory and the metaphysics of the work, religious toleration, the reception of the text by other early modern philosophers, and the relation of the text to Jewish thought. It offers valuable new perspectives on this important and influential work.

Yitzhak Y. Melamed is Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Spinoza's Metaphysics of Substance and Thought (forthcoming), as well as several articles on early modern philosophy, German Idealism and metaphysics.

Michael A. Rosenthal is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Washington. He is the author of numerous articles on Spinoza and early modern philosophy, which have appeared in journals including Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, Journal of the History of Philosophy, and Journal of Political Philosophy.

Titles published in this series:

Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit edited by Dean Moyar and Michael Quante

Mill's On Liberty edited by C. L. Ten

Kant's Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim edited by Amélie Oksenberg Rorty and James Schmidt

Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals edited by Jens Timmermann

Kant's Critique of Practical Reason edited by Andrews Reath and Jens Timmermann

Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations edited by Arif Ahmed

Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript edited by Rick Anthony Furtak

Plato's Republic edited by Mark L. McPherran

Plato's Laws edited by Christopher Bobonich

Kant's Metaphysics of Morals edited by Lara Denis

Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise edited by Yitzhak Y. Melamed and Michael A. Rosenthal

Yitzhak Y. Melamed

Johns Hopkins University

Michael A. Rosenthal

University of Washington

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo, Mexico City

Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521882293

© Cambridge University Press 2010

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2010

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

ISBN 978-0-521-88229-3 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For Ed Curley

Contents

Contributors

Edwin Curley is James B. and Grace J. Nelson Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan. He published the first volume of his edition of Spinoza's collected works in 1985 and is currently working on the second volume; he has also written two books on Spinoza (Spinoza's Metaphysics, 1969 and Behind the Geometrical Method, 1988) and is working on a third, which will focus on the Theological-Political Treatise.

Michael Della Rocca is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Yale University. He is the author of Spinoza (2008), of Representation and the Mind-Body Problem in Spinoza (1997), and of numerous articles in metaphysics and in early modern philosophy.

Don Garrett is Professor of Philosophy at New York University. He is the author of Cognition and Commitment in Hume's Philosophy (1997) and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza (1996).

Warren Zev Harvey is Chair of the Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of many studies on medieval and modern Jewish philosophy, including Physics and Metaphysics in Hasdai Crescas (1998).

Jonathan Israel is Professor of Modern History at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Prior to that he taught for twenty-seven years at University College London. He is the editor of the Cambridge English-language edition of Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (2007, translated by Michael Silverthorne).

Susan James is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College of the University of London. She is the author of several books, including Passion and Action: The Emotions in Early Modern Philosophy (1997), many papers on the history of philosophy, political philosophy, and feminism, as well as the editor of The Political Writings of Margaret Cavendish (Cambridge University Press, 2003). She is currently writing a book about Spinoza's political philosophy.

Mogens Lærke is Lecturer at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. He is the author of Leibniz lecteur de Spinoza. La genèse d'une opposition complexe (2008) and of numerous articles on early modern philosophy. He is editor of The Use of Censorship in the Enlightenment (2009) and co-editor (with M. Kulstad and D. Snyder) of The Philosophy of the Young Leibniz (2009).

Daniel J. Lasker is the Norbert Blechner Professor of Jewish Values in the Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought at Israel's Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in Beer Sheva. He is the author of five books, with additional editions, printings, and translations, and over 175 other publications. His areas of interest are medieval Jewish philosophy (including the thought of Rabbi Judah Halevi, Maimonides, and Rabbi Hasdai Crescas), the Jewish–Christian debate, Karaism and selected issues in Jewish theology and law.

Yitzhak Y. Melamed is an Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Spinoza's Metaphysics of Substance and Thought (forthcoming), as well as several articles on early modern philosophy, German Idealism, and metaphysics.

Michael A. Rosenthal is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Washington. He is the author of numerous articles on Spinoza and early modern philosophy, which have appeared in journals including Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, Journal of the History of Philosophy, and Journal of Political Philosophy. He is currently working on a book on the Theological-Political Treatise.

Donald Rutherford is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Leibniz and the Rational Order of Nature (Cambridge, 1995), editor and translator (with Brandon Look) of The Leibniz–Des Bosses Correspondence (2007), and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Philosophy (2006).

Piet Steenbakkers is Lecturer in the History of Modern Philosophy at the University of Utrecht, and holder of the endowed chair of Spinoza studies at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He is a member of the international research team Groupe de recherches spinozistes, and he is currently involved in a research project on Biblical Criticism and Secularization in the Seventeenth Century.

Justin Steinberg is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Brooklyn College, CUNY. His writings have appeared in the Journal of the History of Philosophy, History of European Ideas, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.