Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

SPINOZA: METAPHYSICS AND KNOWLEDGE 255
It was in about 1661—that is, five years after his excommunication —that
Spinoza wrote his first philosophical works. These were the Tractatus de
Intellectus Emendatione (Treatise on the Correction of the Intellect) and the
Korte Verhandeling van God , de Mensch en deszelfs Welstand (Short Treatise on
God, Man and his Well-being). The firstnamed of these was a treatise on
method, which was meant to be the first part of a two-part work, the second part
of which was to have dealt with metaphysics. 10 Spinoza did not complete the
work, which was first published in 1677 as part of his posthumous works. The
Short Treatise may be a first draft of the work on metaphysics which was to have
followed. Confused and obscure, it was clearly not intended for publication in
the form in which it stands. 11
In both these works Spinoza’s distinctive philosophy is already present,
though in a form that is still immature. The works are also interesting in that they
afford a clear view of some of the influences on Spinoza. The Short Treatise is
particularly instructive in this respect. Not surprisingly, Spinoza makes use of
Descartes; for example, arguments for the existence of God contained in the
eleventh chapter of Part I of the work are clearly derived from Descartes’s
Meditations, Numbers 3 and 5. Equally interesting are the Dutch sources—more
specifically, the Leiden sources—that Spinoza uses. In his account of God as
cause 12 he uses a classification of causes introduced by Franco Burgersdijck (d.
1636), who had been a professor of philosophy at Leiden; his Institutionum
Logicarum Libri Duo (Leiden, 1626) and his Synopsis Burgersdiciana (published
posthumously at Leiden in 1645), a manual of scholastic logic, were popular
textbooks. It is not certain, however, that Spinoza read Burgersdijck’s works; he
may have known them only through the works of Burgersdijck’s successor at
Leiden, Adrian Heereboord (d. 1651). Heereboord produced a revised version of
the Synopsis, entitled Hermeneia Logica (Leiden, 1650), which includes an
exposition of Burgersdijck’s classification of causes; he also commented on this
doctrine in his Meletemata Philosophica (Leiden,1654), a work actually quoted
by Spinoza. 13 Spinoza could also have found in the Meletemata the antithesis
between natura naturans and natura naturata, used in the Short Treatise, and
later in the Ethics. 14 Heereboord is of particular interest in that he sympathized
both with Descartes and with the scholastics, and in particular with Suarez. One
should not assume, therefore, that whenever Spinoza uses scholastic terms this
indicates a study of the original texts; he may well be using the scholastic
Cartesian Heereboord. 15
Spinoza wrote the Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione and the Short Treatise
at Rijnsburg, a village near Leiden, to which he had moved in about 1660. It was
at Rijnsburg also that he began work on his first published book, a geometrical
version of the first two parts of Descartes’s Principia Philosophiae, together with
an appendix of ‘Metaphysical Thoughts’ (Cogitata Metaphysica), published in
Amsterdam in 1663. Spinoza’s version of Descartes’s Principia is purely
expository, and the Cogitata Metaphysica is as it were a Cartesian exercise,
dealing with traditional problems of metaphysics in a Cartesian way (G i, 131).