1 I have tried, in general, to avoid tendentious translations, leaving it to the Glossary-Index to make most of the necessary explanations. Sometimes, however, a translator can hardly avoid taking a stand on disputed issues (e.g., in E ID4). Where it has seemed to me that important questions of interpretation might depend on the translation adopted, I have tried to indicate this in the notes.

2 Spinoza Opera, ed. C. Gebhardt, 4 vols. (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1925). In view of Spinoza’s role in the development of contemporary standards of historical scholarship, it is ironic that this task was so long neglected.

3 Or translators. Gebhardt assumed that there was just one translator, Glazemaker, and that he began his work well before Spinoza’s death (see Gebhardt II/315). The NS translations are generally careful and were already in the press five months after Spinoza’s death (21 February 1677). But as Joachim (2, 3) pointed out, the evidence for ascribing the translations to Glazemaker is not very strong. And Thijssen-Schoute (1, 10) suggested (on the strength of Letter 28) that others may have collaborated. If two or more translators did collaborate on the work, then we need not postulate that they started work long before Spinoza’s death, though probably portions of the NS translations of the Ethics date from the mid-1660s.

I think the treatment of technical terms in the NS confirms the hypothesis of more than one translator. Interesting in this connection is the treatment of mens and anima. As Giancotti Boscherini points out (1, 131), the Dutch translator of the Ethics almost invariably uses ziel for both mens and anima. In the other works he “has abandoned such uniformity” and uses, predominantly, geest for mens and ziel for anima (which, as Giancotti Boscherini notes, is Glazemaker’s regular policy in his translation of Descartes’ Regulae). To me this would suggest that different translators were at work on different parts of the NS and that Glazemaker was probably not the translator of the Ethics. A recent and very thorough examination of this issue by Akkerman (2, 77-214) concludes that Balling probably translated E I-II and that Glazemaker was the translator of E III-V.

4 A good example is E IP28S (II/70/1-15). See particularly editorial note 59. I must add, however, that I think Gebhardt sometimes regards an appeal to the NS as more decisive than it really is. Cf. E IP29D (II/70/26) and editorial note 63.

It is, of course, often difficult to know what to make of a variation. Even in the case of Descartes’ Principles and the Metaphysical Thoughts, where the translations appeared during Spinoza’s lifetime and with his approval (cf. Letter 21), a variation may reflect a revision in which we should see Spinoza’s hand (cf. I/257), an exercise in free translation (Akkerman 2, 106-107, gives numerous examples), or a mistake (cf. I/270/18-20). In the case of the Treatise on the Intellect and the Ethics we cannot be sure that the translations had his approval.

5 By Samuel Shirley, published by Hackett Publishing Co., 1982.

6 Cf. the Theological-Political Treatise, vii (III/99-101). No doubt Spinoza thought these rules applied only to works which, like Scripture, are inherently obscure, not to works which, like Euclid’s geometry, are inherently intelligible (III/111). No doubt, also, he would have classed his own work with Euclid’s. But three hundred years of Spinoza scholarship have amply demonstrated that he was too optimistic about the intelligibility of his work.

7 My model here is Alquié’s superb edition of Descartes’ works.

8 See the prefaces to the Ethics and to Letters 17-28 and the discussions in Freudenthal 5, 1:147ff. and Giancotti Boscherini 2, I, xx-xxii.

9 Though things are changing for the better. We might note here the new translation of Leibniz’s New Essays by Bennett and Remnant (Cambridge), the new edition of Locke’s Essay by Nidditch (Oxford), and the translations of Leibniz’s Discourse on Metaphysics, Correspondence with Arnauld, and Correspondence with Clarke, published by Manchester University Press.

10 Pollock, in introducing the index to his Spinoza, aptly cites the following lovely remark, attributed by Henry Wheatley to John Baynes: “The man who publishes a book without an index ought to be damned ten miles beyond Hell, where the Devil could not get for stinging nettles.”

11 For more on this theme, see the Glossary-Index.

12 But not, I think, invariably. Cf., for example, II/57/13,79/23. Sometimes Spinoza uses aut or vel where we would expect sive. Cf. II/51/23, 52/8, 146/2.

13 In medieval Latin, however, ille came to be used as a definite article and there appear to be some traces of that usage in Spinoza. Cf. II/89/4. Analogously, it seems to me that aliqui is sometimes best rendered by the indefinite article, e.g. at II/50/25, 28, 30, 31, 34 and II/83/31. In the latter case, this may have some philosophic significance, since that passage provides us with a gloss on one of the central propositions of Part I of the Ethics (P16).

Spinoza’s Latin has sometimes been stigmatized as that of the late medieval scholastics. No doubt much of the technical vocabulary is borrowed from the scholastics. But the reader will find a juster appreciation of Spinoza’s Latin in Akkerman 2, 1-35.