BENEDICT DE SPINOZA: Theological-Political Treatise

Annotations: Spinoza’s supplementary
notes to theTheological-Political Treatise
In the years after the publication of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus,
Spinoza gradually added a number of supplementary notes in the
margins of his own personal copy which we know he wished to see
added to the published version. ‘I should like you’, he wrote to Henry
Oldenburg, in September 1675,‘to point out to me the passages in the
Tractatus Theologio-Politicus which have proved a stumbling-block to
learned men. For I want to clarify this treatise with some additional
notes and, if possible remove the prejudices which have been conceived
against it.’ 1 The copy furnished with these Adnotationes was sent from
The Hague to his publisher, Jan Rieuwertsz, in Amsterdam, after
Spinoza’s death, in 1677, along with the rest of his manuscripts and
papers. Although this original version subsequently disappeared without
trace, most of the notes appeared in the French version of the
Tractatus, in1678, while the remainder, and nearly all those previously
known only in the French version, were rediscovered in modern times.
They were found, in their Latin versions, as hand-written explanatory
notes on various manuscripts and printed copies of the book. The
fullest version, a list of 36 Latin Adnotationes compiled by Prosper
Marchand (1675^1756), survives today in a manuscript kept in the
Leiden University Library. However, there remains a certain amount of
disagreement among scholars as to whether all or only most of these
notes were actually written by Spinoza himself.
1 Spinoza, The Letters, 322; see also Fokke Akkerman, ‘Aantekeningen’ to Spinoza, Theologisch-
Politiek Traktaat (ed.) F. Akkerman (Amsterdam, 1997), p. 438.
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