Spinoza’s Failed Rhetoric of a Supposedly Inconspicuous Transition to Secularity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The purpose of this chapter is to trace rhetorical misjudgments in Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise. For instance, Spinoza’s revelation in Letter 30 (written to Henry Oldenburg) that one of the things motivating him to write the Theological-Political Treatise was setting to rest popular conceptions of him as an atheist suggests that his efforts to blunt or muffle the radicalness of his challenges to conventional religion were rhetorically much less effective than he may have hoped. He deploys “devices of prudence” such as conventional images of God, revelation, and prophecy that he knows to be sub-philosophical, but seems to underestimate the capacity of his readers to see through these devices. But it is not my view that such rhetorical misjudgments (if that is what they were) were a bad thing. On the contrary, this chapter suggests that Spinoza’s overestimation of the efficacy of his prudential devices, and corresponding underestimation of how readers would react to his work, made it possible for him (whether he intended it or not) to deliver a truly radical work that contributed decisively to the origins of the Enlightenment. Would he have done this if he had more correctly judged the rhetorical impact?
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".