Methods of Teaching or Discovery? Analysis and Synthesis from Zabarella to Spinoza

Abstract

This contribution looks directly at the so-called novatores and their own appropriation and reworking of the traditional methodological and pedagogic approaches. It shows how academic approaches and established tradition worked not only as a polemical target but also as a crucial resource that nourished the growth of alternatives to academic and Aristotelian approaches. This point is developed by discussing in detail the problem of method in Spinoza, and by connecting it with its scholastic background. By the mid-seventeenth century proponents of controversial philosophies appropriated more familiar didactic genres to convey their radical doctrines. For instance, the first book of Thomas Hobbes’s De Corpore follows the familiar order of standard Scholastic Aristotelian logic textbooks, and Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics emulates Euclid’s Elements, by presenting astounding conclusions about nature and extension more geometrico. There is a long-standing debate regarding whether Spinoza’s geometrical method is a method of discovery or merely a method of presentation. This contribution examines Spinoza’s reflections on method in the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect in the context of contemporaneous conceptions of analysis and synthesis found in the works of Zabarella, Burgersdijk, Descartes, and Hobbes to identify the most plausible readings of his method in the Ethics.