Monday, July 29, 2019

Circle, God, Human

In the Ethics, Spinoza characterizes the idea of a Circle as 'caused by God'.  Thus, according to his Parallelism, a bodily Circle is also caused by God.  In Improvement of the Understanding, he presents an operational definition of Circle, i. e. how to draw one.  So, given that only Humans seem to have the capability of drawing anything, and Spinoza offers no example of a Circle that is produced by non-Human agency, the attribution of the production of a Circle to an omnipresent deity seems trivial.  Instead significant is his perhaps unwitting alignment with Protagoras that Geometry is a strictly Human science, with the implication that the Aristotelian deity is an anthropomorphic creation.  This status in his Rationalist doctrine thus perhaps stands as a transition to its all-too-human status in Kantian Rationalism.

No comments:

Post a Comment