Spinoza’s Optical Letters: Redux

As some know, primarily last summer I spent my time researching and theorizing on Spinoza’s lensgrinding and optical concepts, a largely underdeveloped field in Spinoza studies. The greater portions of my findings are listed here on this site under the sub-heading Spinoza’s Foci. A spearpoint of this research was uncovering the substantive arguments and conceptions that [...]

Spinoza’s Grinding Lathe: An Extended Hypothesis

A Proposed Homologue to Spinoza’s Grinding Lathe It has been revealed by some digging into the record by Stan Verdult that indeed the lathe that occupies the Rijnsburg Spinoza museum is not of the sort Spinoza would have used (though it may give us a sense of the size of his lathe). [Written about here: The [...]

Spinoza as Craftsman: A Closer Look

The Craftsman An initial synthesis of some of the aspects of my research and a more refined notion of craftsmanship: writing to think through. This is not the place to write a review of Richard Sennett’s provocative, subtly powerful book The Craftsman. I can only say in that vein, it is a book I highly recommend for those who [...]

Glazemaker a lens grinding influence: Gullan-Whur

Reading Margaret Gullan-Whur’s often speculative, though quite vivid and deeply researched biography of Spinoza: Within Reason: A Life of Spinoza (1998), I see that she joins me in my loose intuition that Spinoza’s later translator Jan Glazenmaker may have been an influence in Spinoza learning how to grind lenses [offered up here:Jan Hendriksz Glazemaker…the Glazier ]. As [...]

Some Rough Thoughts On Spinoza and Technology

The Free Hand Today, in contemplating Spinoza’s objection to Huygens’s semi-automated lens-grinding lathe (from Letter 32), and considering what it might mean for an overall Spinoza view of technology, I am struck by an immediate incongruity. Christiaan Huygens’s love of the mechanical, that is the ambition for the nearly direct implementation of the math to [...]

Did the Huygenses “buy” Spinoza’s lens polishing technique?

The Meteoric Rise of Huygens’s Microscope The following is an exercise in historical imagination, only meant to elicit what is possible from what we know. Perhaps a fiction bent towards fact. Wim Klever has brought to my attention a detail which sheds some light upon the possible lens polishing techniques Spinoza employed. Admittedly the connective tissue for [...]

Some Personal Thoughts on a Possible Spinoza Lathe

Some discussion has been going on over at the Practical Machinist forum, where I have sought any views about the real world workings of any of the devices Spinoza may have used at grind lenses. I have come to the thought that it might very well be a rather simple device that Spinoza used, not [...]

A Short Note on the Notion of Spinoza as Craftsman

I was discussing with my wife this developing idea that Spinoza’s metaphysical work needs to be understood in light of the specific practices and techniques he engaged in as a lens-grinder. I was busy describing to her how physical the act of lathing is, the dynamics of its transformations, and how when one watches it, seeing it, [...]

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 [...]

The Lathe Mind: What Spinoza Meant by “Individual”

  What is a Lathe? I have begun my study of the lens-grinding practices of Spinoza, and how they may have helped structure his non-Cartesian conception of Representation, and metaphysics. I will not be reporting the preponderance of my discoveries here, saving them for an article in process, but already efforts are paying off. Very [...]