Dit jaar verscheen Andrew Janiak & Eric Schliesser (Eds): Interpreting Newton. Critical Essays. Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Waarom moet dat op dit blog gesignaleerd worden? Om het hoofdstuk van Schliesser: “The Newtonian refutation of Spinoza: Newton's Challenge and the Socratic Problem” Op de website van de Vakgroep Wijsbegeerte en Moraalwetenschap van de Universiteit Gent, waar Schliesser werkzaam is, vinden we over dit hoofdstuk de volgende informatie:
“In this chapter I discuss the philosophic and historical significance of Colin MacLaurin’s attacks on Spinoza’s metaphysics in his posthumously published, An Account of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophical Discoveries (1748/1968; hereafter Account). The main point of the chapter is to illustrate how the Socratic Problem and Newton’s Challenge are debated at the start of the eighteenth century. Recognizing the importance and nature of these debates can help us both to understand the partial origin of some canonical versions of our philosophical history and, if we wish, to correct them in favor of more revealing ones. Finally, the mere existence of MacLaurin’s treatment undermines a widely accepted historiographic myth that members of the Scottish Enlightenment (Hume, Adam Smith, Reid, etc.) only knew and thought of Spinoza through Bayle’s treatment.”
