Spinoza’s Brilliant Neighbor, The Huygens Estate: Hofwijck

Christiaan Huygens drawing of Hofwijck, where Spinoza would have visited To add to the picture of the quiet Huygens family estate at Voorburg we have a drawing of it by the hand of Christiaan Huygens himself (undated). This brings a certain vividness to any imagined visit by Spinoza in the summer of 1665 [thought about here: [...]

Huygens’s Lens

This struck me as such a remarkable image, one that I have found in my just nascent research into Spinoza’s lens-grinding techniques (Huygens was a companion and nearby neighbor of Spinoza’s in the years 1664 and ’65). This is the lens with which Huygens discovered the first moon of Saturn (in March of 1655), and then the rings, as [...]

Spinoza’s Comments on Huygens’s Progress

The Particularities of Spinoza’s Questions of Technique  In Spinoza’s letter (15/32) to Royal Society secretary, Henry Oldenburg, after a summary of the reasons why Spinoza believes that “each part of nature agrees with its whole,” in which our knowledge position is compared to that of a worm living in our blood, the letter finishes with a few seemingly mundane [...]