Spinoza?

Spinoza was a guest star in one of my classes today, the first time in decades. The long maligned and now endlessly celebrated Dutch Jewish philosopher is central to the modern history of "pantheism," and so plays an important part in Mary-Jane Rubenstein's Pantheologies, focus of one of my classes this semester. Students are required to trace some of Rubenstein's important sources, and so we had two back-to-back presentations on Spinoza today, one on the Ethics and one on the Theological-Political Tractatus. One presentation started with this image, which was new to me, and which I took for something recent and second rate. Rediscovered less than a decade ago, it turns out it may be the only portrait for which Spinoza sat, though the evidence for it is circumstantial. It's dated to 1666 and probably by one Barend Graat, known to have known people Spinoza knew, but the pagan Roman background is improbable. Still, it looks like a graduate student in philosophy and that was enough for my students. 

I've long resisted Spinoza's charms, since he was he has so often been contrasted (always favorably!) with Leibniz, my dissertation subject, but there is a nerdy "charisma" to him, as one student presenter put it today. Pantheologies gives pride of place to Spinoza, too. In what she calls a "faithful betrayal," Rubenstein argues that the pantheistic view Spinoza lays out is more pluralistic than he could imagine, given 17th century science. I'm (so far) resisting the temptation to say that if you want a pluralist Spinoza you need look no farther than Leibniz. 

But isn't Leibniz in the American philosophical canon in part because William James - another star of Pantheologies - thought he offered a pluralistic alternative to the Spinozan monism of Josiah Royce? (That claim, made in an essay by Bruce Kuklick called "Seven thinkers and how they grew," was the basis of the last class I taught in which Spinoza came up, "Spinoza, Leibniz, Royce and James," in a different life long ago.) I'm not quite ready to trot out the "Monadology," but Leibniz' - quite Spinozan - theory of the "striving possibles" seems like something Rubenstein's "hypothetical pluralist pantheist" might like.