On Spinoza

Rating:
Summary: A nice addition to the Wadsworth series
Review: Diane Steinberg's excellent little introduction to Spinoza is, in terms of "technicalness," at about the next level up from Roger Scruton's fine volume. The reader unfamiliar with Spinoza but possessing some background in philosophy may prefer to start with this volume rather than with Scruton's, although on the whole I still like Scruton's a little better.

In just ninety-three pages, Steinberg covers the gamut of Spinoza's thought. She devotes an introductory chapter to a short account of his life, and then dedicates a chapter each to his metaphysics, his views of mind and body, his psychology, his ethics, and his philosophical methodology. The presentation is solid and tight.

One advantage over Scruton's older introduction, by the way, is that Steinberg has taken into account certain more recent works on Spinoza -- including material from the conferences at the Jerusalem Spinoza Institute of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (edited by Yirmiyahu Yovel), and the disagreement between Jonathan Bennett and Edwin Curley about the exact nature of "attributes" and "modes" in Spinoza's thought. (This is also the sort of thing I have in mind when I say Steinberg's introduction is a bit more technical than Scruton's, so the advantage may be a disadvantage for some readers.)

On the whole, then, this well-executed little book is a welcome addition to the recent Spinoza literature.

However, through (I assume) no fault of the author's, it suffers from some stupendously poor editing/proofreading. The widespread use of word-processing software has made possible an entirely new class of typographical error, and it seems that the folks at Wadsworth haven't quite caught up.

For example, on a quick skim through the book, I found four or five places in which a double hyphen hasn't been properly replaced by an em-dash. More seriously, the bottom half of p. 22 is left blank for no good reason -- not, one presumes, because there is any text missing, but because there is a page break in the text at this point that somebody forgot to delete. And on the bottom of p. 47, we find the first seven words of a boldface section heading: "Substance Monism and the Doctrine of Mode." The last word -- "Identity" -- is stranded alone at the top of p. 48, where the new section actually begins.

(There are also a handful of minor misspellings, mostly in the textual citations from Spinoza: "th" for "the," "bu" for "but," and so forth. And I won't list the occasional grammatical oddities that appear here and there throughout the text.)

Let's hope Wadsworth corrects this stuff in future editions of the book. It's distracting.