Buyse, Filip:
The Philosopher Spinoza and the Sciences

In: ThinKnow [Special issue: Spinoza] / Cemre Yilmaz. - [Turkey] : Düşünbil Publishing, 2021: 10. - (2)

Contains bibliography: Ja/yes

Literature type: Articles
Language: English
Thematic areas: Overall view / introduction, Contemporaries and context

English commentary: Spinoza is, first and foremost, a philosopher. However, in his time, there was no strict distinction between natural philosophy and, what we today call, “science”. Many natural philosophers, such as Leibniz and Descartes, were also “scientists” just as many “early scientists”, such as Robert Boyle, were also philosophers. As his personal library illustrates, Spinoza was extremely interested in the developments of the new science. Moreover, when he lived in Rijnsburg (a small village near Leyden), he worked as a lens grinder, specifically for microscopes and telescopes, and often taught Cartesian mathesis to students of Leyden university. His skills as a lens grinder were highly praised by his contemporaries, Leibniz and Huygens. The publication of his private course on Cartesianism led to the publication of the only book he released under his name during his lifetime and to an invitation to become a professor at the University of Heidelberg. Ultimately, he declined this invitation, as he did not want to lose his intellectual freedom. In the same period, around 1661, according to Nicolas Steno (1638-1686), Spinoza visited anatomy dissections on a daily basis. Indeed, in a report to the Holy Office (dated 4 September 1677) found in the Vatican Archive, the Danish anatomist wrote that: “… in that period he [Spinoza] paid me daily visits to see the anatomical investigations of the brain that I carried out on several animals in order to discover the place where motions begins and sensations ends […]” (abstract)URL: http://https://thinknowmag.org/2021/02/06/the-philosopher-spinoza-and-the-sciences/

Link to this page: http://spinoza.hab.de/detail.php?id=20953&LANG=EN