239 / 298
Vico’s Ring
239
477
Another key aspect of Spinoza’s reflections on the Hebrew language is
his identification of its grammaticalization with the “mentality” or “spirit” of
the people that spoke it (
ibid.
, p. 345).
478
See also the assessment by Morgan: «It is likely that Spinoza’s grammat-
ical inquiry, then, mirrors the commitments of his philosophical thinking
overall. It is guided, on the one hand, by his scientific naturalism and, on the
other, by his commitment to a priori reasoning akin to that found in geometry
– or, in this case, in Latin, viewed by him as reflecting a pure, a priori struc-
ture» (Id.,
Spinoza: Complete Works
, cit., p. 585). This view is shared by Y. Y.
Melamed: «[…] between the lines of this text, one can easily find some of Spi-
noza’s most crucial metaphysical doctrines. One example is a certain analogy
Spinoza draws between parts of speech – nouns […], adjectives, participles,
and the metaphysical terms they denote – substance, attributes, modes». Mel-
amed cites Spinoza’s own exposition from the end of Chapter 33 (Id.,
Spino-
za’s Metaphysics: Substance and Thought
, Oxford-New York, Oxford University
Press, 2013, pp. 30-32); Melamed follows W. Z. Harvey,
Spinoza’s Metaphysical
Hebraism
, in
Jewish Themes in Spinoza’s Philosophy
, ed. by H. M. Ravven and L. E.
Goodman, Albany, New York, State University of New York Press, 2002, pp.
107-114.
479
«When I touched on this topic I did make a brief reference to the im-
portance of knowing all these details, but there I deliberately passed over cer-
tain considerations which must now be taken up» (
TTP
, p. 97).
480
See Vico’s
The Art of Rhetoric
,
cit., pp. 95-98, commenting: «The use of
accumulation in the oratory is very great when different and several facts are
enumerated in order to emphasize and to urge on, and they are brought to-
gether as though into a pile» (
ibid.
, p. 97).
481
As a representative of mid-17
th
-century textual scholarship, Walton
may be cited, especially in connection with his lengthy
Prolegomena
of 102 folio
pages included in the appendix of the first volume of the London Polyglot
Bible. Among other subjects, Walton addressed the potential usefulness of
cognate languages in dealing with ambiguities in the original Hebrew, but no-
tably the problem of textual differences in the extant versions, proposing
guidelines for text-criticism, as part of which he also emphasized the need to
study the co-text (
sive antecedentia & consequentia
) and “parallel passages” (
locu-
rum parallelorum & similium observatio
)
.
See Miller,
The “Antiquarianization” of Bib-
lical Scholarship and the London Polyglot Bible
, cit., pp. 474-481, concluding: «[…]
Walton and those he cites were indeed asking the sort of questions about an-
cient Judaism and Christianity that would later be posed by sociologists, an-
thropologists, and historians of religion». See also P. Gibert,
L’invention critique