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Comment by nologic01 | Hacker News Reader

I did try going through Ethica [1] some time ago, but to be honest the axiom, theorem, proof format did not resonate with me. Maybe I should give it another go or read a digested account of it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_(Spinoza_book)

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For a first pass I highly recommend reading the Ethics backwards, and only focusing on the collaries and the notes at the end of each section. Ignore the axioms and proofs for the first few passes through the book.

The content and notes at the end of sections are much easier to read and quite beautiful.

When I first read Ethics in the order presented I was deeply confused as to why Spinoza was considered the "prince of philosophers". After revising my approach he's rapidly becoming one of my favorite.

Despite it's presentation, the Ethics is much better approached in a very non-linear fashion.

edit: I also recommend Deleuze's Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. If you've read Deleuze's other work you may or may not be put off by this recommendation, but his work on Spinoza covers a lot of ground an is very readable.

This totally makes sense. The axiomatic derivation and "mathematical" presentation may have had good motivation at the time (maybe to intimidate critics?) but it seems to raise the bar unnecessarily high given this is philosophical text, not rigorous mathematics. Reading it sequentially and taking the mathematical form seriously makes it subject to a "propagation of errors" type pathology [1] (the unease that the next statement simply follows logically from the previous ones keeps growing).

In the end what is interesting is to understand his philosophical world view which no doubt had internal coherence.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propagation_of_uncertainty

Philosophical texts are not novels; they are more like scientific publications, requiring prior study. Unless you have a solid grounding in the history of philosophy, they are incomprehensible.

I minored in Undergrad. I thought the program would be easy because the credit hours required was lower compared to other similar program's requirements. Boy was I wrong. When I took metaphysics the reading list in the syllabus was roughly as large as your average English Lit. course, but I probably spent twice as much time on that 300-level three hour class as I ever spent on any other similar class. I pride myself in my reading comprehension skills. Even today I typically only have to read the majority of things once before understanding it. I think I re-read everything in that class at least twice if not more depending on the philosopher.

Not questioning your intelligence or your studies.

But I wouldn't presume to understand a paper in, say, topology or number theory, without a degree in mathematics.

Philosophy has the appearance of accessibility, because it uses ordinary language. But without an MA in Philosophy, a working knowledge of Latin, and some notion of context (Renaissance culture and Judaism) I wouldn't expect to understand Spinoza.

Sure, I wouldn't either. When I said the majority of things, I meant literature, documentation, and common legal documents, not so much advanced theoretical papers or if I'm being completely honest, most things in mathematics. I re-read those too.

I have a BS in Math and a great deal of papers that are in topology or number theory are basically inscrutable to me without significant effort to get the relevant background information.

Math and philosophy are both extremely challenging subjects with deep wells of information to draw from.

Several times I have attempted to turn Ethica into a graph notation form that I could then run through query tools, in multiple translations even. (Most recently in my first couple weeks at RelationalAI where I began to encode it into their graph-relational Rel language.) I never finish. It's too much work.

But I think this is actually the missing piece. Reading it as a text end-to-end is just pain. I'm sure Spinoza himself was able to mentally "browse" the text and it all fit together for him, but this would require incredible discipline.

Having nice tools to query and analyze it and project it to be readable in multiple forms would go a long way with that text (and maybe others written in the 'geometrical' form).

Maybe I'll give it another whirl in a Datalog variant like CozoDB etc. And maybe just restrict my efforts to the first section only. And maybe something like ChatGPT and/or CoPilot could help.

Yeah, I had the same experience, but I found video series on youtube where they discuss each chapter which I found very helpful.

I'll recommend a video series on it also, for the same reason. While I enjoy the content, the presentation just didn't click.

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