Curley, Edwin. “Notes on a Neglected Masterpiece: Spinoza and the Science of Hermeneutics.” Spinoza: The Enduring Questions (2001): 64–97.
Excerpt:
“In “Spinoza: Scientist and Theorist of Scientific Method,”[1] David Savan has raised two very important questions: 1) what is the place and importance of Spinoza’s work as a practising scientist? and 2) what did Spinoza think were the right rules to follow in carrying out specific scientific investigations? By connecting these questions, and asking first what Spinoza’s actual contributions to the sciences were, Professor Savan suggests that in assessing Spinoza’s epistemology we ought to look not only at his theoretical writings about science, nor only at those theoretical writings plus his practise in the Ethics, but also at his practise as a scientist in areas which we, who tend to distinguish philosophy from the sciences, would count as sciences. If we do this, he contends, we will find Spinoza to be much less the paradigm of aprioristic rationalism he is generally taken to be, and much more an empiricist. This reading of Spinoza’s theory of knowledge is one I find highly congenial, since it agrees with conclusions I once reached by a different route.[2]
[1] In Spinoza and the Sciences, ed. by Marjorie Grene and Debra Nails, Vol. 91 of the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1986, pp. 95-123.
[2] See my “Experience in Spinoza’s Theory of Knowledge,” in Spinoza, a collection of critical essays, ed. by Marjorie Grene, Doubleday/Anchor, 1973, pp. 25-59, and Grene’s introduction to Spinoza and the Sciences, pp. xvi-xvii. I’ve discussed the more general problem of whether there really was an epistemological movement properly called rationalism in my contribution on rationalism, in the Companion to Epistemology, forthcoming from Blackwell, edited by Ernest Sosa and Jonathan Dancy.”