Peeling Potatoes or Grinding Lenses

by Baltas, Aristides

• ISBN13: 9780822944164
• ISBN10: 0822944162
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-01-28
• Publisher: Univ of Pittsburgh Pr

Summary

"I can work best now while peeling potatoes. . . . It is for me what lens-grinding was for Spinoza."-L. Wittgenstein More than 250 years separate the publication of Baruch Spinoza's Ethicsand Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.Both are considered monumental philosophical treatises, produced during markedly different times in human history, and notoriously challenging to interpret. In Peeling Potatoes or Grinding Lenses,Aristides Baltas contends that these works bear a striking similarity based on the idea of "radical immanence." Each purports to understand the world, thought, and language from the inside and in a way leading to the dissolution of all philosophy. In that guise, both offer a powerful argument against fundamentalism of all sorts and kinds. To Spinoza, God is just Nature. God is not above or separate from the world, humanity, or mere objects for, as Nature, He inheres in everything. To Wittgenstein, logic is not above or separate from language, thought, and the world. The hardness of the logical "must" inheres in states of affairs, facts, thoughts, and linguistic acts. Outside there are no truths or sense-only nonsense. Through close readings of the texts based on lessons drawn from radical paradigm change in science, Baltas finds in both works a single-minded purpose, implacable reasoning, and an austerity of style that are rare in the history of philosophy. He analyzes the structure and content of each treatise, the authors' intentions, the limitations and possibilities afforded by scientific discovery in their respective eras, their radical opposition to prevailing philosophical views, and draws out the particulars, as well as the implications, of the arresting match between the two.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. xi
Note on References and List of Abbreviations	p. xvii
Coordinates of a Conversation	p. 1
Mutual Introductions	p. 23
Similarities and Affinities	p. 24
Rigor	p. 26
Method	p. 28
Insight	p. 32
Purposes and Ends	p. 40
Activity and Purpose	p. 42
Purpose and Responsibility	p. 46
... and the World	p. 48
End	p. 49
Eternity	p. 51
Spinoza's Body	p. 55
Life	p. 57
Nothing	p. 59
Silence	p. 61
Grammar	p. 63
Not My Purpose...	p. 63
History and the History of Philosophy	p. 65
The History of Philosophy and Philosophy	p. 66
Philosophy and the History of Science	p. 68
The History of Science, Language, and Philosophy Again	p. 71
Grammar and Paradigm Change	p. 73
From Grammar to Logic and Back	p. 77
Teacher and Student	p. 80
Wittgenstein's Body	p. 84
Telling Nonsense	p. 86
Strategies	p. 88
Spinoza's Strategy; First Round	p. 88
Wittgenstein's Position	p. 89
Thinking of Strategy	p. 90
My Strategy	p. 92
The Strategy of the Tractatus: Opening Moves	p. 97
Working from Within	p. 100
The First Movement	p. 102
Classifying Propositions	p. 107
Performing Futility	p. 110
Organizing Content	p. 113
Plans	p. 114
Structures	p. 121
Beginnings	p. 125
Matching Constraints	p. 130
Metaphysics	p. 137
Substance I	p. 139
Spinoza's Grammar	p. 142
Spinoza's Strategy: Second Round	p. 145
Epistemologyl	p. 151
Language	p. 155
Substance II	p. 159
Bodies	p. 165
Afterlife	p. 168
Substance III	p. 170
Matching Content	p. 174
Spinoza's Attributes	p. 174
Psychoanalysis	p. 177
Historical Materialism	p. 181
Scientific Perspectives versus Logical Manifolds	p. 183
Ideas versus Thoughts; Extended Modes versus Facts	p. 185
Epistemology II	p. 188
Matching Form	p. 194
Possible Facts versus Possible Extended Modes	p. 194
Natural Space versus Logical Space	p. 197
Order and Connection versus Form and Structure	p. 200
The Metaphysical Subject	p. 202
Fractals	p. 204
Natural History	p. 209
Physics	p. 214
Natural Necessity versus Logical Possibility	p. 219
Logic in God, Logic of God	p. 225
Exodus: Toward History and Its Surprises	p. 231
Notes	p. 253
References	p. 275
Index	p. 285
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