Talk:Philosophy of Spinoza

Suggestions on references

These are guidelines rather than hard rules, but are different from WP.

In general, we respect the writer's expertise to pick the single best reference on a point. When I see [1][2][3], I wonder if [2] and [3] are essentially establishing the same point as [1], or if, perhaps, there are nuances that could be developed from [2] and [3].

--Howard C. Berkowitz 14:40, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

Hi Howard. This article existed for a month or so on Wikipedia before being overwritten. The reason for the repeated references was "the more the better"; I'm a Wikipedia veteran, and I always tried to put more references in to try to keep stuff from being deleted. But it may not be necessary here on CZ. I don't think I put much thought into "which reference was best" but definitely I'll try to avoid multiple references if this is against CZ policy; I've only been on CZ a day or so now, and am trying to adjust. Do you know about philosophy?--Thomas Wright Sulcer 14:47, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

I don't consider myself a philosopher, except in narrow areas such as military and medical ethics. Reasonably eclectic, though -- I'm an Editor for Military, Medical and Engineering, and frequent contributor to Politics, Health Sciences, Visual Arts, Geography, Media and a few other things.

Also, and again an informal convention, we've tended not to put quotes into citations. If they are significant, they belong in the main article — the reader doesn't know to click footnotes to find supplementary text beyond the bibliographic.

I'm delighted, though, to see you jumping in. While I'm not a Spinoza expert or philosophy editor, I am somewhat interested in his work, and can give you the lower-case-e perspective of a nonspecialist reader. --Howard C. Berkowitz 15:00, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

Created article

I wrote this article initially for Wikipedia back in November 2009 perhaps? It's generally solid but there are some problems and I hope to fix them as I get around to it.--Thomas Wright Sulcer 14:44, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

The initial idea of this article was to present an outline of Spinoza's philosophy in clear and simple terms so that it would be accessible to even high school students. To make the subject less dry, I avoided difficult words whenever possible, and wrote this from the ground up in a hopefully user-friendly way, working into difficult concepts slowly, such as substance, and with plenty of pictures to emphasize key ideas like cause-and-effect. But I'm a layman, not a scholar or professor; so I borrowed heavily from two professionals; one was Henry Allison who wrote a book about "The Ethics"; and another a professional named Steven Nadler who wrote "Spinoza's Ethics: An Introduction" which is a well-written introduction. So the article has a strong basis in reliable fact; I had perhaps around 40 to 50 quotes of Nadler's book here. I emailed him and showed him the draft on Wikipedia, but he objected to being quoted extensively (copyright issues?) and suggested I stick with direct quoting of Spinoza. And he didn't offer any help fixing it up either. So I spent another day or so removing references to Nadler, rewriting explanations when suitable in my own words. In addition, the only translation of Spinoza online which I could find was Elwes (100+ years ago). According to Nadler, the best translations of Spinoza are Curley or Shirley (unsure which) since they're both newer, more accepted; but they're not online. So, sooner or later I'll try to get a copy of one of these and switch the Elwes references around.--Thomas Wright Sulcer 14:44, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

On Wikipedia, I ran into problems with several editors regarding the Spinoza article. One didn't like the animations (Newton's Cradle, etc) since they supposedly consumed too much bandwidth. Another claimed to be a graduate student in philosophy who said the article was "all wrong" and, in very insulting terms (much of the talk page was overhauled -- click on the "archives" if interested in seeing the insults), took it over and rewrote it. I'm still not sure what was going on here; most likely, the second editor looked at my user page, saw I was a handyman, and assumed the article was "all wrong" without perhaps reading it much? I don't know -- it didn't help that all of the references to Nadler's book were removed, which pulled out the foundation of the article. So I let the article get overwritten; I wanted to see what would result from the new effort; plus, I wasn't sure if this new editor was, in fact, a philosophy grad student like he (she?) claimed. As of Feb 17th 2010, the current version on Wikipedia is (in my view) extremely difficult to read, much shorter, minus the pictures, and is more like a bare-bones outline of some of Spinoza's more difficult ideas. I don't think anybody looking at the article would be interested in learning more about Spinoza, after reading the current Wikipedia article; but that's my sense of it. But I began having more problems with Wikipedia and abandoned my work there around January 2010, and felt it wasn't worth the effort.--Thomas Wright Sulcer 14:44, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

So, I'm thinking this article still has a solid base, but it would be helpful if there are CZ editors who know about philosophy to help me improve it.--Thomas Wright Sulcer 14:44, 17 February 2010 (UTC)