178 / 298
Horst Steinke
178
Spinoza: Critical Assessments
, vol. I:
Context, Sources and the Early
Writings, ed. by
G. Lloyd, London-New York, Routledge, 2001, pp. 185-195, p. 192.
344
His correspondent on matters of science was mainly his friend Henry
Oldenburg in London, both before and after Oldenburg became the first sec-
retary of the newly formed Royal Society in 1662.
345
Letter 6,
quoted from B. Spinoza,
The Letters
, trans. by S. Shirley, intro.
and notes by S. Barbone, L. Rice, and J. Miller, Indianapolis, Hackett Publish-
ing, 1995; other letters will be quoted from this edition also.
The reference to infinity is reminiscent of
Ethics
, Part I, Proposition XL,
and Part II, Proposition IV.
346
Pace
Cristofolini who considers the phenomena of nature and physical
bodies as the domain of the second kind of knowledge, while the human
world constitutes the proper object of intuitive knowledge (Id.,
La scienza intui-
tiva di Spinoza
, cit., pp. 223-225). From this perspective. Cristofolini sees it as a
«new science», in the exact sense expressed by Vico half a century later.
347
Letter 13.
348
In any discussion of Spinoza’s philosophy, this brief, clearly oversimpli-
fied, summary of the three kinds of knowledge would not be the end of the
matter but only the starting point; however, more importantly, the apparent
strict segregation between the three kinds of knowledge outlined here is not
merely editorial but intentional, being the result of certain presuppositions on
our part. These presuppostions revolve around the term and concept of «kind,
genus
». While Spinoza studies do not seem to take up the question of this no-
tion, at least as best as we can determine, it has been the object of extensive
philosophical reflection outside of Spinoza scholarship, for which see
The
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(Winter 2012 Edition), online at
<http://plato.stanford.edu>, under «Natural Kinds», by A. Bird and E. To-
bin, ed. by E. N. Zalta. “Kindhood” turns out to be a surprisingly complex
idea, subject to inherent tensions that are stubbornly resistant to resolution.
On the one hand, it is fairly straightforward to understood kindhood theoreti-
cally as recognition of definite boundaries, clustering, joints in the flux of real-
ity, relatively, or even strongly, impervious to seamless transitions from one
kind to another, but far more difficult to determine kindhood in concrete cas-
es. It is also necessary to consider second-order kinds, that is, kinds of kinds
(see T. E. Wilkerson,
Natural Kinds
, Aldershot-Brookfield, Avebury, 1995, pp.
53-59). At the same time, there is a view of kindhood that may connect with
Spinoza’s views, namely, the “essentialist” view of kinds, «the view that an in-
dividual must have a certain property, a certain real essence, if and only if it is
to be a member of a certain natural kind» (
ibid.
, p. 141). This is, in fact, the
presupposition on the basis of which we are approaching Spinoza’s three