ABSTRACT
Introduction An oddity of writing a book that compares two thinkers is that if they agree on every aspect of their respective philosophies, then the comparison is not very interesting. Similarly, if they disagree on every aspect of their thought, then the comparison is equally pointless. What we really want is a situation in which they are alike, but different. The two thinkers need to be just different enough that they can learn from each other’s thought. In this respect Davidson and Spinoza are the perfect candidates. Historically they are far enough apart to guarantee that they have not met. And by a sheer coincidence and probably a lack of time, Davidson did not write very much about Spinoza, although there is ample evidence that he was very interested in the similarities between Spinoza’s thought and his own.1 The difficulty that remains for a comparison of this kind is to gauge the similarity and difference between the two candidates for comparison just right, so that the comparison yields a result that is useful. Useful here must be taken quite literally. There is little point in merely pointing out that Davidson’s thought is in some ways similar to that of Spinoza. That would be of no more interest than to point out that Kant was in all likelihood not left unmoved by Plato’s thought. The appropriate response to such an investigation would be: ‘Duhh...!’ The point of a comparison between two thinkers must surely be that we can learn something new from this comparison. In some way the realization that the two views are in an unexpected way alike should, ideally, lead us to a new, better view. In this case I believe that exactly that is a possibility. The clash between Spinoza’s three hundred years old philosophy and that of twentieth century Davidson should give us precisely that new, better view that we are looking for. The reason for this is not coincidental. The expected yield of this comparison is, in my view, a direct result of the right degree of similarity between the philosophies of the two thinkers. It is the perhaps unexpected similarity between the thought of two thinkers who lived their lives
1 To the best of my knowledge there is only one article that Davidson wrote that is immediately about Spinoza: ‘Spinoza’s Causal Theory of the Affects’ in Yovel, 1999 (reprinted in Davidson 2005, pp.295-313). Other than that Davidson mentions Spinoza and hints at similarities with his own work several times, for instance in Davidson, 1980, p.212, and in his intellectual autobiography in The Philosophy of Donald Davidson, Hahn, 1999, p.64.
