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I'm in the process of updating this site to correct various problems. Contact me directly at emcurley@umich.edu if you have questions.

What I Do

I've spent most of my professional life working, in one way or another, on a 17th Century Dutch philosopher named Spinoza. My first serious encounter with him came when I spent a year, between my second and third years of graduate work at Duke, teaching at a small, liberal arts college in the Shenandoah Mountains of Virginia, Washington and Lee University. One of my assignments there was to teach a two-semester survey of the history of philosophy from Thales to Kant. Although my knowledge of the history of philosophy was as limited as you might expect, given the amount of study I had at that stage devoted to the subject, I got by… did not feel that I had embarrassed myself horribly… for most of the course. That changed when I got to Spinoza. My only previous dealings with his thought had been through secondary sources, in an undergraduate course similar to the one I was now teaching, and in Will Durant’s Story of Philosophy. (Durant’s chapter on Spinoza in that book still seems to me one of the best introductions to his work you can find.) But one thing graduate school had taught me was the importance of reading the primary texts. And when I tried to explain the first propositions of Part I of the Ethics to my students, I found that I had no idea how to make sense of them.

When I went back to Duke that summer, I started to work seriously on my dissertation, which I then thought would be in contemporary philosophy of science, on the laws of nature and their role in scientific explanation. At that stage work on the dissertation consisted mainly in reading the literature and trying to get a sense of what the central problems were in that area. In the fall I learned that one of my favorite professors, Bernard Peach, was offering a graduate seminar on Spinoza. I signed up for it, not intending to change the subject of my dissertation, just thinking that perhaps the next time I had to teach Spinoza I would be able to do a better job of it. Half way through the course I wrote a short paper which had some ideas in it I thought gave me a better understanding of his system, and particularly of his doctrine that everything which happens in the world happens necessarily. By December I had turned that short paper into a term paper and decided to change my dissertation topic. By the spring that term paper had become a my dissertation.

I finished my dissertation on Spinoza’s metaphysics in 1963 and went off to teach at San Jose State University, where the teaching load was heavy and the opportunities to teach Spinoza minimal. (He is way too hard for undergraduates without much background in philosophy.) Then good luck struck. I applied for and got a research fellowship in philosophy at the Australian National University, in a department chaired by John Passmore, whose work in the history of philosophy I greatly admired and who was an extraordinarily helpful mentor. Under these wonderful conditions I revised my dissertation in two years and had it accepted by Harvard UP. This won me a permanent research position at the ANU, which emboldened me to embark on a translation of Spinoza’s works. All of them, or at least nearly all. (I’ve always been somewhat ambivalent about including Spinoza’s Hebrew Grammar­.) In the years I had spent working on that first book, I had come to feel that the existing English translations of Spinoza were very poor, particularly as compared with the translations available in French and German. The most widely used translation was done in the 19^th Century, when there was not a good critical edition of the original language texts, did not meet modern standards of accuracy and readability, and essentially provided no editorial aids, in the form of indexing, annotation, and introductions. So I embarked on putting together an edition which would make Spinoza’s work available in a more satisfactory form. Though I have done other things along the way, that has been my life’s work.

When I started on this project, I did not realize how hard it would be or how long it would take to complete. The contract I signed with Princeton in the fall of 1969 called for finishing two volumes, containing all (or nearly all) of the works by June of 1972. In the event, Volume I came out in 1985 and Volume II in 2016. These contained everything we have from Spinoza except that grammar of the Hebrew language. I am now working, with two collaborators, Steve Nadler and Russ Leo, on a third volume, which will include that grammar along with other works from the period, which we think are important for understanding Spinoza’s thought: most notably, the preface Spinoza’s friends wrote for his Opera posthuma and documents related to his excommunication, as a young man, from the Amsterdam Jewish community in which he had grown up.

Why did the edition take so long? The main reason – apart from the sheer difficulty of the task – is the other things I’ve done along the way. Usually my excuse was that the distracting project was related in some way to Spinoza. Not only would it be interesting in itself, but working on it would give me a better understanding of Spinoza, and make me a better translator of his work. This is the rationale (rationalization?) for my Descartes Against the Skeptics (1978), my edition of Hobbes' Leviathan (1994), my essays on various topics in Spinoza, and the work I've been doing lately on the rise of religious liberty in the early modern period.

Between 1500 and 1800 the culture I belong to underwent a major transformation. At the beginning of that period hardly anyone in Western Europe or the American colonies thought religious liberty was a good thing. By the end of that period progressive governments regarded it as a fundamental right. I knew that Spinoza, whose Theological-Political Treatise was the first book-length defense of freedom of thought and expression by a major philosopher, had played a role in that development. Much of my work lately has been focused on trying to determine what he contributed to the conversation which hadn't been said before, and what impact his writing had.

Why devote so much time and energy to Spinoza? One reason is that I admire his intellect, his boldness, and his character generally. Another is that I think he got certain important things right: things about the nature of God, the nature of human beings, and the nature of a good human life. That's not a trivial accomplishment. A couple of the articles reproduced in the Spinoza section of this website give more detail about that, but my best attempt to explain Spinoza's thought in a way accessible to the general reader is in an article I wrote for the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2006). Copyright considerations preclude me from posting that article. But if you have a college or university affiliation, your school should give you online access to it.

Another reason is that I feel a certain affinity for Spinoza. I got into philosophy because I'd been brought up as a Christian, but in my teens became dissatisfied with the answers the Christian religion gave to certain important questions about God and morality. I wanted something better. (Some of my recent work has been devoted to exploring those issues in a way which has no direct connection with Spinoza.) Spinoza was brought up Jewish, in a very different time and place. But at about the same stage of his life he became disillusioned with his childhood religion. This is a common enough experience. But it's worth thinking about seriously. The questions are hard, but important.