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Responses to Spinoza: Burman to Le Clerc
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Chapter 2 surveys early responses to Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus in the Dutch Republic. These include well-known published refutations, such as those by Regnerus van Mansveld (1674) and Frans Kuyper (1676), but also initiatives that never came to fruition, such as those of Jacobus Alting and Antonius Perizonius. Within these responses two main themes stand out: on the one hand, puzzlement at the metaphysics that implicitly underlies Spinoza’s terse biblical exegesis; on the other, indignation at his carefree employment of well-established philological methods in arguments that led to outrageous conclusions. Focussing on the latter, it is argued that a substantial part of the dismissive response to Spinoza was characterized by ‘scripturarianism’, the philological engagement with the biblical source texts in their original languages. Dutch scripturarians were unsettled, as their philological approach could be portrayed as leading to the highly unconventional biblical interpretations voiced by Spinoza and some of his eccentric contemporaries.
Title: Responses to Spinoza: Burman to Le Clerc
Description:
Chapter 2 surveys early responses to Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus in the Dutch Republic.
These include well-known published refutations, such as those by Regnerus van Mansveld (1674) and Frans Kuyper (1676), but also initiatives that never came to fruition, such as those of Jacobus Alting and Antonius Perizonius.
Within these responses two main themes stand out: on the one hand, puzzlement at the metaphysics that implicitly underlies Spinoza’s terse biblical exegesis; on the other, indignation at his carefree employment of well-established philological methods in arguments that led to outrageous conclusions.
Focussing on the latter, it is argued that a substantial part of the dismissive response to Spinoza was characterized by ‘scripturarianism’, the philological engagement with the biblical source texts in their original languages.
Dutch scripturarians were unsettled, as their philological approach could be portrayed as leading to the highly unconventional biblical interpretations voiced by Spinoza and some of his eccentric contemporaries.
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