Happy Spinoza Day to all Spinozists, on this his 390th posthumous birthday! 🎂🥂🍾🎇🎆
After watching Susan James presenting her paper: 'Spinoza on Animal Species' (available on YouTube here) it struck me that maybe she was talking about, and assuming, knowledge of taxonomy. So I started to wonder what biological categorisation systems were and were not in place in Spinoza's time. Otherwise, we Spinozists could accidentally write off his ideas as mere wild imaginings or we could simply wonder what on earth he was talking about 🤔. Especially post-Darwin, we tend to make modern day assumptions and so are puzzled why Spinoza is not fitting in with our expectations. This is particularly relevant to refer to today because Darwin's The Origin of Species was first published on this day in 1859. So the contemporary reader may ask themselves: Has Spinoza got it wrong? After all, Spinoza was a physicist (designing high-end lenses for scientists, for instance, for telescopes), not a biologist.
As philosophers, we can be inclined to become fancy and start talking metaphysics and getting into that type of terminology (such as common notions; particulars and universals) which, I think, misses the point. Spinoza was a scientist so I don't think he'd put forward scientifically inaccurate metaphysics, or at least to the extent of making his metaphysics consistent with the scientific knowledge that was available to him in his era. However, did not just stay with being a physicist, he happily corresponded about biology and chemistry, including cutting edge experiments and his own original thoughts. In this sense, academics in the Early Modern era, such as Spinoza and Cavendish, didn't suffer from over-specialising in one field, so they had a very holistic approach and could make more wide-ranging connections than perhaps many do today. By not going to university to choose only one small subcategory of science to study eg biochemistry or medicine or physics, they didn't narrow down their research fields. Early Modern philosophers kept building up their knowledge and research over the course of their whole lives. They didn't separate out fields of research, but rather intertwined and combined fields of study at will, both within philosophy as well as between philosophy and other subjects eg biology and philosophy. After all, science was called Natural Philosophy during that period. Both philosophers and scientists were doing similar or the same work at times. This is not the case now, when they are unhelpfully separated into STEM and not STEM, making Philosophy 'not STEM', a distinction that never crossed Early Modern thinkers' minds.
Nevertheless, there are contemporary exceptions, one being Susan James because she has such a strong scientific family background that she can briefly, almost causally, refer to obscure biological facts in her papers that the rest of us have no idea about. In this way, she can go over our heads in her research, particularly when it touches on science. In order to understand her, you need a good scientific background yourself, which luckily I possess! Maybe this is why I understand her better and click more easily with her thinking and method. It's not a mystery why this is. It's a scientific approach that speaks to me more than someone who jumps around in their train of thought and suddenly introduces literary references almost randomly, as Arendt is inclined to do. Susan James can therefore sometimes assume scientific concepts and knowledge that most philosophers simply don't have sitting in their head. Perhaps she takes her scientific knowledge for granted and assumes all educated people share the same knowledge as her. A perfectly reasonable assumption. However, her scientific abilities are part and parcel of her schooling and their exam board requirements (OCR?) which is not the identical scientific education of most other philosophers in the UK or abroad. In addition she had (and still has) the advantage of being able to discuss science over the dining room table. I was lucky enough to be able to do the same with my uncle (Josef) but he didn't live with us so the input was obviously less. Luckily, my mother could take up the slack but she'd never pretend to be as good at biology as Susan James's father.
It is just possible that since Susan James's paper isn't a philosophy of science paper, but has different focuses, such as emotion, she maybe thought that too much scientific explanation would be off the point. But I think it does have relevance to our understanding some of what underpins her general outlook, therefore helps for understanding her interpretation and methodological approach.
Thus, without Susan James explicitly saying so, I feel she is somewhat assuming knowledge of taxonomy in this paper. I always think she should be less brief in her papers, because with such a breadth and depth of knowledge that she possesses people can fail to appreciate the subtle points of her argument and therefore get a bit lost, lose the thread and fail to assess it accurately.
So, I want to pick up on the background concept of taxonomy because I've always had a scientific approach to metaphysics. In other words, I like to scientifically fact-check metaphysical concepts to avoid the well-known problem with metaphysics which is that it can be so theoretical that it becomes irrelevant and runs the risk of being plain wrong, scientifically speaking. Why is that a problem? Because it impacts on the truth of the metaphysical statements and concepts.
So, I wish to assess Spinoza on animals and species by comparing it with the scientific classification system of taxonomy. However, to be fair to Spinoza, we cannot criticise him for not possessing our present day scientific knowledge about species.
Therefore, I began by researching the history of taxonomy so I could chart the progress of the knowledge of taxonomy down the ages to assess:
What was the information possibly available to Spinoza?
What advancements in knowledge have been made since?
Does it impact on Spinoza's views on animals and species in general?
So what is Taxonomy?
There is neither a single definition of the term taxonomy, nor a robust definition of species so we are still relying on what Spinoza refers to as inadequate ideas in this area of science. Taxonomy works on two interconnecting layers: macrotaxonomy (higher classes and subgenuses) and microtaxonomy (which examines how to define what a species is).
What is the field of Taxonomy? It's the science of creating a classification system and defining the subcategories within the Taxonomic structure, often depicted using hierarchical flow charts. The category of species is one of the main subcategories within this classification structure. The present day system is based on 18th century Carl Linnaeus (1707-78) whereas Spinoza lived in the 17th century (1632-77).
Therefore, I suggest, there is an historical gap between Spinoza's 17th century knowledge, perspective, and arguments going on around him, compared with those surrounding us in the 21st century. For instance, nowadays we have the benefit of using a Taxonomy /classification system which fully takes into account the theory of evolution. So we can't expect Spinoza to account for our modern day knowledge, whether it be scientific, political, feminist or anything else.
Gaspard Bauhin (1560-1624) created a classification system but focused on vegetation. Although Bauhin was before Spinoza's time, he nonetheless influenced the 17th century Taxonomist, John Ray (1627-1705), an Englishman who lived during Spinoza's lifetime. Ray argued against having fixed, binary either/or way of categorising nature. Instead, Ray categorised things, usually plants, based on his observations and classed them according to how similar or dissimilar they were/are. Spinoza may have heard of him because Ray became fellow of the Royal Society in 1667 and Spinoza was aware of the scientific experiments and findings of those involved in the Royal Society in the UK. Irrespectively, I think Ray's way of classifying nature could be relevant and makes for an interesting comparison because Spinoza also uses similarity and dissimilarity to compare animals, amongst other things, so he could be working within a similar approach to Ray. This gives Spinoza contemporary relevance too, because scientists still draw on a selection of Ray's discoveries today. Moreover, Ray is a key figure in taxonomy because he was a pioneer in initiating, what people believe to be, the first definition of species, which depicts them as not only being organisms which have similar characteristics, but also as having an ancestor in common with each other. How Darwinian of him! And contemporary, given that present day genetic researchers still argue over the possibility of what's known as a mitochondrial Eve, who has been claimed by some to be the first ancestor of humans, I'm terms of DNA.
After Ray, the next well-known Taxonomist was Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1656-1708) whose main contribution to Taxonomy was progressing our knowledge of taxonomy by setting out a distinction between the categories of genera and species.
Tournefort influenced perhaps the most famous Taxonomist, Carl Linnaeus (1707-78). Indeed, classifying animals was not a priority until the 18th century, partly because they were more concerned about classifying things which impacted on their health or food supply, hence their focus on vegetation, which includes vegetables and herbs.
So in Spinoza's lifetime, pre-18th century, animal categorisation was seen as a mere manmade, slightly random and messy way to classify things in the world. This is significant because Spinoza expresses similar views, which makes him up-to-date and the norm for his era. This may also mean that only assessing the strengths and weaknesses of Spinoza's classification, or lack of contemporary style classifications, need not rely solely on his metaphysics. His concept of animal descriptions and classifications, I think, is just as much reliant on the science of his era as it was on his monism.
To be continued......
