Talk:Philosophy of Spinoza/Archive 1

Created article
Spinoza's philosophy can be difficult stuff, and I (the guy who started this article) am not an expert or philosopher or anything near it. But I was trying to explain in common words and phrases so that people might have a chance to grasp this rather difficult-to-grasp philosophy. Plus I put in pictures to try to make it interesting and not so boring. I know Wikipedia doesn't like lists but I thought that the propositions, and definitions of the emotions, were really cool stuff that gets to the heart of what Spinoza is all about, and I didn't want to take any of this stuff out. When I get time I'll try to add sources from other places like newspapers and scholarly journals and such; right now it's based on only a few sources (but I really went through them). Unfortunately the Nadler material isn't reachable by online -directly so there are no urls in the references. But the other stuff can be referenced. And I'll try to add more sources in the future which have direct inline urls.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 06:16, 10 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Resourced article; more direct

references which are more easily searched using online databases and translations. Rewrote some sections for clarity, copyediting, flow. Added picture. Trying to make article more interesting, on-topic, fun, accessible.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 06:07, 11 December 2009 (UTC)


 * I am

a graduate student who works predominantly on Spinoza, so I've made a few minor edits while browsing this article, just to make sure what you have said conforms to what Spinoza actually said. I may add some more substantial revisions though. The problem with philosophy, and with Spinoza in particular, is that there are often multiple 'standard' interpretations of the work, and I've tried to avoid treading on anyone's toes in the few edits I've made so far. The idea should be to reflect what Spinoza actually said in a way that is perspective-neutral (or, as Spinoza would have said, this article would best be presented sub specie aeternitatis. Philosopher Torin (talk) 23:23, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Why all the pictures/animations?
It seems like there are too many pictures and animations for an article of this size. Some pictures are fine to have, but too many can be distracting from the article itself. A lot of the pictures are only related to the content by their caption, such as the animation of the running horse. The only reason that the picture is there is that the caption mentions a person and a horse. Therefore, the caption is the only thing justifying the picture's presence in the article. A picture should be connected to the content of the article by something more than just its caption. Some pictures, such as the pictures of nature, have no discernible relationship to the article other than the fact that Spinoza talked about nature. So, rather than having to stop reading the article to read the picture's caption then go back to the article, why not just add some of the captions to the article and remove most of the pictures all together? It would make the article much more concise without taking away from the material, and a reader can get learn it faster.--Alang pennstate &#39;13 (talk) 14:40, 12 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Good

question. I thought about this, and wonder sometimes whether I went overboard with the pictures. My thinking was much of rational philosophy was rather dry, bordering on the boring, and trying to do anything to improve the visual appeal of the article was my purpose. Frankly, I don't think most people read much anymore; I bet six of every ten readers will only skim this article, so the ONLY way to possibly reach the skimmers is with pictures and captions. Let me ask: how much of this article did you, yourself, read? Did you read from start to finish? Can you explain Spinoza's philosophy? If you're like most people, I'm guessing, you skipped over huge chunks like the propositions, or the definitions (am I right?) So the only way to communicate about things like "love" as an emotion, possibly, is with pictures like the ice cream cone and the picture of the lovers. And I think animated pictures to illustrate the ideas with pictures in some ways make the points BETTER than the text, such as the idea of higher knowledge. Spinoza's thinking is HUGELY DIFFICULT to grasp because of its intense simplicity, and I'm trying to make the article accessible to a wide range of possible readers. Last, I have a bias against static stuff; I get bored; anything moving on the page gives me the feeling of being outside. So I enjoy anything visual like a waterfall, but I agree, it's not superly relevant. Such was my thinking.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 15:22, 12 December 2009 (UTC)


 * That

said, this article is no longer mine. I created it. It's community property. Wikipedia has a policy which I support called WP:OWN. So, if you feel you can improve it, please be my guest.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 15:45, 12 December 2009 (UTC)


 * I thought that the pictures

and moving graphics were very good. I understand the "distraction" argument, but think that this is a noble attempt to effectively use the computer to effectively illustrate the concepts on the article. While editors may differ, I don't think it is solely our mission to recreate Encyclopedia Britannica [http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/ Scanned version] of the famous 11th edition articles in electronic form. Not to mention that the content has a lot of substance, is well researched and documented. I think that Tomwsulcer deserves our thanks and appreciation for trying to move the encylopaedia into the 21st Century and for "thinking out of the box." To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, 'The Medium is the Massage'.7&amp;6=thirteen (talk) 15:53, 12 December 2009 (UTC) Stan


 * Hey

thanks Stan! I appreciate your comments. I hope people enjoy the article!--Tomwsulcer (talk) 18:31, 12 December 2009 (UTC)


 * You

caught me...I did skip over parts of the article. I'm a college student in philosophy and have an exam coming up, so I was using this and other articles as a sort of study-aid. I definitely see your point in trying to make dry topics more appealing to the eye, and I agree that with some of them (such as Philosophy of Spinoza or Existential Therapy), they could use a little flavor in the article, and pictures can do a good job of this. Having said that, I'm remarking that it is possible to go overboard with the pictures, and so even when the article needs a little extra excitement, we should be careful to keep the pictures at least somewhat related to the topic. On a side note, maybe an image of Spinoza at the top of the article would help with that.--Alang pennstate &#39;13 (talk) 10:01, 13 December 2009 (UTC)


 * By

the way, other than that little issue I had with the images (which really is a trivial problem), the article is really well-done. Good Job.--Alang pennstate &#39;13 (talk) 10:02, 13 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Well, thanks for your compliments, it's

appreciated. And the reason I guessed about skipping chunks is, well, guess what? I skipped them too. Sometimes Spinoza overwhelms me with stuff. But it's there so if people get interested in this stuff, it's there to look at. If you attend Penn State, congratulations on getting into a tough school. There's a professor at Penn State named Garrett Fagen who has a "Teaching Company" course (audio CDs which are excellent). He's supposedly working on a book about Roman games. If you bump into him, ask him about his upcoming book. And good luck in philosophy!--Tomwsulcer (talk) 13:56, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

Tom, this article is certainly unique amongst the 100s I have browsed on WP - though I shall now be checking out some of your many others. My response is that it seems to be trying to "teach" methodically rather than presenting information for the reader to use according to their own process. Would it not then be better as a Wikiversity page, cited from a more modest, less coloured article here?

Entertainment is also tempered by a desire to get to the "core" of the issue as efficiently as possible and then work outward. Have you considered that purely from a technical standpoint, the bandwidth required to load all of the images is far in excess of some people's - certainly my mobile - capability and probably others in far flung places! At the very least, I would appreciate the images displayed as low bandwidth thumbs which I could then decide to follow up if considered relevant to my activity on the page, rather than waiting around for 15 minutes for many to load to find out *if* they are relevant. I'll keep my eyes here from time to time, Trev M (talk) 20:59, 23 January 2010 (UTC)


 * Spinoza can be difficult; I don't see how

else to present the information without starting, as Spinoza did, from core principles and working outwards. If we tried to write Spinoza like a news article, it would be hard to communicate his philosophy; what Spinoza does is realign some basic concepts, and rushing into heavy ideas, without going over the basic concepts (causation, substance, etc) then most people won't get it. The idea is to make rather difficult ideas available to general readers. And to try to make some distinction between "teaching" and "presenting information" seems difficult; doesn't presenting information involve "teaching" and teaching involve "presenting information"? Like, is there any article on Wikipedia which doesn't teach? Perhaps it's the tone you object to; this is a community project as you know, and you're free to try to improve it. If there is some objection to the order of ideas, then I'm open to considering other possibilities. But reaction to this article has been positive; two readers familiar with Spinoza complimented me on the project; in addition, a Spinoza scholar and expert read it, and while he didn't comment, he didn't say that I got anything wrong (I'm only a handyman btw not an expert). If you'd like to copy it for another project, be my guest; it's free information available for everybody. About the animations: Spinoza, presented as Spinoza presented his own material, can be rather dry stuff; the purpose of the animations is to make it less boring as well as illustrating some rather difficult-to-get concepts; perhaps there's a way to illustrate tough ideas other than animations, but I haven't found out what it is yet. I don't know what to tell you about how the article works on different types of computers. If you think the article doesn't belong on Wikipedia for some reason, please make a case for this.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 14:43, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

A Fair Overhaul
I just went through much of the article and tried to rid it of obscurities, misunderstandings, and other issues. However, there were (and still are) a lot of issues (understandably, as you yourself pointed out, you are not a philosopher). Your attempt is certainly valiant, and commendable, and I will try to preserve as much of the spirit of what you wrote as possible, but there are many things you've said that really must be fixed. Philosopher Torin (talk) 00:02, 2 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Hey thanks your contributions are most welcome! I had

tried earlier to get a professional Spinoza scholar to work with me, and look over my shoulder, but this didn't happen. I was worried that I wasn't getting everything right so I appreciate your assistance. Plus I wonder whether the list sections on the emotions could be written better perhaps, because I think most readers probably gloss over this section. There is another editor seeking to remove all the animations for reasons such as being too distracting, and I'm on the fence about this -- I had thought the animations were ideal for explaining rather difficult concepts, but I'm uncertain at this point. A danger with writing about Spinoza is, as you know, to get so technical, and use words with such precision (as Spinoza did) that people today don't grasp what Spinoza meant. As much as possible, I tried to use simple metaphors to explain the ideas, but there's always a danger of missing the exact point. Again, Vielen Dank für Ihre Hilfe. Die Philosophie ist ein gutes Thema. Sind Sie ein Amerikaner? Oder sind Sie ein Deutscher? Also, please remember that most of Wikipedia's readers will have trouble grappling with terms like "axiom" and "lexicon" which is why I tried to avoid these terms, and played down the abstruse distinctions regarding "attributes", and carefully walked into things like "substance". What I had tried to avoid was making Spinoza difficult to grasp; it's easy to turn this into an advanced grad school topic, but then most readers won't get what Spinoza was trying to say. --Tomwsulcer (talk) 00:48, 2 February 2010 (UTC)


 * The point about terminology is fair,

but certain terms must be preserved and phrases avoided, otherwise this would simply cease to be an article about Spinoza's philosophy (and instead be an article about one person's modified version of it). Perhaps one way to combat this would be to adopt a Spinozistic approach and provide somewhat accessible definitions of certain key terms at or near the beginning of the article.


 * As for the images, I

think using images to illustrate the concepts is a great idea, but I think your explanations under each image are/were misleading, and misrepresent Spinoza's philosophy in certain ways (not because you misunderstand it, but I think in your earnest attempt to make it accessible you have actually just changed the meanings). I think this can be fixed, though. Philosopher Torin (talk) 02:38, 2 February 2010 (UTC)

The Translation
The Elwes translation may be free/online, but it isn't very good. The standard translations in English are either Shirley or Curley. Curley's is preferrable for various reasons. I can systematically go through and fix this, but it will take time. Philosopher Torin (talk) 02:56, 2 February 2010 (UTC)


 * I hunted for Curley online but couldn't find it. While

Elwes is an older translation, it's readily accessible and checkable, so if a user wants to quickly get at Spinoza's work, it's only two mouse clicks away.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 04:32, 2 February 2010 (UTC)


 * A

bigger question is: where do you want to take this article? My original intent was to make the basics of the philosophy of Spinoza available to most Wikipedia readers -- so it's geared to high school seniors perhaps or the first or second year of college. The idea was to get the essence of the basic concepts -- cause-and-effect, substance, and so forth. So I deliberately toned down difficult concepts, and worked slowly, with plenty of pictures, and steered clear of tough words. This is Wikipedia's purpose, in a sense -- to share knowledge widely, to make difficult concepts accessible, to foster learning. Isn't this in everybody's best interests, that is, to have more enlightened people in the world who have a chance to come to grips with philosophy without getting intimidated? I don't think books on Spinoza will ever be big moneymakers, and there will always be a need for scholars, so I don't think there's any cause to worry that making Spinoza accessible on Wikipedia will hurt anybody's book sales or attendance in philosophy classes. If you click "page view statistics" after clicking the "History" tab, you'll see if people are reading this article.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 04:32, 2 February 2010 (UTC)


 * But it

seems to me like you're working this into a more obscure, professional-sounding tract which maybe only heavy-duty philosophy students may be interested in. Look at the first few lines here: ''Baruch Spinoza philosophy is one of the three canonical Rationalist philosophies which arose in Europe in the Early Modern period (Descartes and Leibniz are the other two).[1][2][3] Spinoza's philosophy is characterized largely by its deep and unwavering commitment to the Principle of Sufficient Reason (henceforth, PSR). In his "Ethics", Spinoza sought to construct a philosophical system which would illuminate reality.'' This is the kind of opening that, in my view, will scare away most college students. Canonical Rationalist philosophies? Yikes. Early Modern Period? What's that, they may ask themselves. Principle of Sufficient Reason -- what's that? And phrases like "characterized largely by..." and "construct a philosophical system which would illuminate reality" -- sounds academic and obscure and not fun. My recommendation is to keep the writing style accessible -- I think there's a Wikipedia ruling suggesting that we try to avoid an academic high brow tone -- but at the same time, it's good to be accurate. By the way, this is the first time I've ever heard of "Principle of Sufficient Reason" -- never come across that one before. But overall my general interest in Wikipedia is waning and I probably won't be contributing much any more, so if you wish to lead this article in new directions, you're on your own.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 04:32, 2 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Well, college students should

NOT be using this article as a resource. They are supposed to be better than that. This article is full of errors, and any college student repeating anything they read here (even the few things that I've tried to fix) would not get a passing grade. I know because I grade papers and I can tell who uses Wikipedia (as can most profs). It isn't that Wikipedia isn't good at all, it's that it is generally not good enough to be an academic resource, especially when non-specialists are writing articles about technical topics they don't really understand, like this one (no offense).


 * Sorry, but if you don't understand those

sentences that I wrote, then you don't understand Spinoza. They aren't even difficult sentences. Principle of Sufficient Reason has its own article on Wikipedia, which I linked to, and so, if they don't know what it means, they can click the link. "Early Modern" is referenced in the "Modern Philosophy" article on Wikipedia as well, I just didn't link to it (hadn't got around to it yet..)


 * As far as the

translation goes, the point is not about "academic translation" versus "accessible translation", it's about which translation is more correct, and Curley's and Shirley's are simple more correct than Elwes's. Period. It isn't even the case that Elwes's is somehow "easier". That doesn't even make sense. Elwes's is just bad, because it is inconsistent and non-standard. That doesn't mean it's not usable as a quick-and-dirty reference. But for an encyclopedia article, it is a terrible choice.


 * The way you wrote the original article

was better suited for the "Simple English" version of Wikipedia, but I wouldn't even want it there because of all the thing in it that made no sense at all. (again, no offense (okay, a little offense, as I found a lot of the content of your article offensive as someone who does actually work on Spinoza), it's clear that you have a certain idea of what an article like this is meant to accomplish, but I think you've taken it too far away from the point of an encyclopedia (which is to be informative to the general reader, not a piece of fluff). Philosopher Torin (talk) 23:25, 2 February 2010 (UTC)