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Document Details : Title: Van den Enden is niet het meesterbrein achter Spinoza Subtitle: Spinoza's uitzonderingspositie herbevestigd Author(s): DE DIJN, Herman Journal: Tijdschrift voor Filosofie Volume: 85 Issue: 3 Date: 2023 Pages: 311-335 DOI: 10.2143/TVF.85.3.3292842 Abstract : The incentive to write this paper was the re-editing, in contemporary Dutch, of Franciscus van den Enden’s Vrije Politijke Stellingen by C.L. Vermeulen in 2022 under the title Vrije staatkundige stellingen. Spinoza scholar Wim Klever discovered that the author of an anonymous political pamphlet with the title Vrije Politijke Stellingen was Franciscus van den Enden, Spinoza’s Latin teacher. Klever edited the pamphlet in 1992. In the introduction to this (first) edition, he established that Van den Enden was the author of the pamphlet; but he also tried to prove that its content revealed Van den Enden as the unknown mastermind behind Spinoza, a kind of proto-Spinoza. This myth is now very widespread (also via the internet) and put forward even in relatively recent biographies of Spinoza by Steven Nadler and Margaret Gullan-Whur. Even though the myth has from the very beginning been debunked by several Spinoza scholars, in Vermeulen’s new edition it is propagated once again, without any critical comment. In this paper, I hope to demonstrate definitively, both on historical-hermeneutic grounds and on the basis of philosophical comparison, that the myth has no validity whatsoever. In the historical-hermeneutic part, I mainly rely on the thorough research undertaken by Frank Mertens on this topic. The results of his research, both concerning the pamphlet and the cultural-intellectual circles to which Van den Enden belonged, completely undermine Klever’s casting of Van den Enden as a proto-Spinoza. It turns out that Van den Enden is, interestingly enough, rather a kind of proto-Rousseau. The second part of my paper consists of a close philosophical comparison of Van den Enden’s Vrije staatkundige stellingen and Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. This reveals that their respective political philosophies are miles apart from each other. In other words, there is no ground whatsoever for the idea of an influence — one way or the other. My philosophical analysis of Spinoza’s political ideas can serve as a brief, in-depth introduction to Spinoza’s realist, anti-utopian political philosophy. |
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