IN VOLUME I, I undertook to make reference to the pagination of the Gebhardt edition1 standard for discussions of Spinoza’s works, as reference to certain older editions of Plato and Aristotle has long been standard for those ancient philosophers. Though Gebhardt’s edition is in the process of being superseded by the edition published by Presses Universitaires de France (PUF),2 the idea of using the Gebhardt pagination as a standard form of reference remains valid and seems to be gaining some acceptance. Gebhardt’s edition is available online in the InteLex database, which is a great convenience for those who have access to it (as students and teachers often will through a university or college library), and many secondary works use it in their references.
I give the Gebhardt pagination and line numbers in the margins. In footnotes and prefaces “Gebhardt III/5” (or sometimes simply “III/5”) refers to Volume III, page 5 of the Gebhardt edition. “Gebhardt III/273/10–22” refers to Volume III, page 273, lines 10–22 of that edition.
For the Political Treatise (Tractatus politicus, or TP) Spinoza’s Opera posthuma numbered the paragraphs in each chapter, and those paragraph numbers often provide the most convenient way to refer to a passage. So “TP iii, 1” refers to the first paragraph in Chapter 3 of the Political Treatise.
The paragraphs in the Theological-Political Treatise (Tractatus theologicopoliticus, or TTP) were not numbered and are often rather long. In company with some other writers on Spinoza, I like to use the paragraph numbering system introduced by a nineteenth-century German editor, C. H. Bruder, who generally breaks the text up into fairly short and coherent units. I give the Bruder paragraphing of the TTP in brackets in the text of that work and use chapter and Bruder paragraph numbers within the TTP to refer to other sections of that work. So within the TTP a footnote reference to “vii, 23” refers to Bruder paragraph 23 in chapter 7 of the TTP. More recently ALM have introduced their own system of paragraph numbers for the TTP, which I don’t find so convenient, since it tends to take as its paragraphs longer portions of the text, which don’t permit as precise a reference as the Bruder paragraphs. But to accommodate readers who wish to follow references to the text which use that system, I have added on pp. 767–69 a table correlating the ALM paragraph numbers with the Bruder paragraph numbers.
References to other works of Spinoza use the following abbreviations:
KV = |
Korte Verhandeling van God, de Mensch, en des Zelfs Welstand (Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being = Short Treatise) |
TdIE = |
Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione (Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect = Treatise on the Intellect) |
Ep. = |
Epistolae (Letters) |
PP = |
Renati Des Cartes Principiorum philosophiae, Pars I & II, More geometrico demonstrata (Parts I and II of Descartes’ “Principles of Philosophy” = Descartes’ Principles), published in Latin in 1663, and in a Dutch translation in 1664 |
CM = |
Cogitata metaphysica (Metaphysical Thoughts) |
E = |
Ethica (Ethics) |
OP = |
Opera posthuma (Posthumous Works), published in 1677, containing the first printed editions of the TdIE, Ep., E, TP, and a(n incomplete) grammar of the Hebrew language |
NS = |
De nagelate schriften, a Dutch version of the OP, published in the same year but without a translation of the Hebrew Grammar |
In addition, for works written in the geometric style, it is often most convenient to use the following abbreviations:
A = |
axiom |
D (following a roman numeral) = |
definition |
D (following an arabic numeral) = |
demonstration |
P = |
proposition |
L = |
lemma |
C = |
corollary |
S = |
scholium (i.e., a note, often containing an important digression from the main line of argument in the text) |
Exp. = |
explanation |
App. = |
appendix |
Def. Aff. = |
definition of the affects |
So “PP I D5” refers to Definition 5 of Part I of Descartes’ Principles. “E I P8S2” refers to the Scholium 2 to Proposition 8 of Part I of the Ethics.
For more abbreviations and short titles, used in referring to works by other authors, see Works Cited, pp. 724–64.