Bibliographic record
Abstract
I critique the theological-philosophical assumptions that Leo Strauss uses to justify his controversial method of reading Baruch Spinoza, and I conclude by justifying an alternative interpretive method. Strauss’s method suggests that Spinoza’s texts intentionally contradict themselves so to couch his more controversial views in established dogma, thereby skirting the censorship of authorities. Strauss argues that reading “between the lines” allows the more astute of Spinoza’s readers to decipher an encrypted pentimento that reveals an esoteric or hidden aspect of his philosophy. Although Strauss’s method is divisive within the scholarship, Edwin Curley – a leading Spinoza translator and commentator – has, on more than one occasion, signaled his support for Strauss’s method despite expressing a sympathy with Strauss’s critics. I argue that Curley’s analysis of the issue does not fully engage the problem posed by Strauss’s elitism. I deny that Strauss and his proponents offer a viable strategy for interpreting Spinoza’s writings because they recapitulate the interpretive principles of Plato’s “philosopher-king” which Spinoza explicitly rejects in the Theological Political Treatise (TPT) through his critique of Maimonides. I argue that Spinoza’s writings should be interpreted according to the same method of biblical interpretation that he pioneers in the TPT. Accordingly, a text – whether sacred or profane – cannot be adequately interpreted on the basis of standards extrinsic to the text itself, including the unilateral judgement of the reader. But neither can a text be adequately interpreted without the judgment of the reader, as if its truth were hidden within the text itself independent of the minds that strive to interpret it. Therefore, in exactly the same way that Spinoza interprets the Bible through a socio-historical method, so also should Spinoza’s writings be interpreted through a socio-historical method that encounters and modifies the differences between author, text, and reader through a logic that is common to all three and private to none.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".