Locke: A Biography (review)
chapters deal with Spinoza’s Tractatus de intellectuas emendatione. These include possibly the most useful contribution to this volume, Eugenio Canone and Pina Totaro’s “Index locorum du Tractatus de intellectus emendatione.” Two of the papers sketch out opposing positions in an ongoing debate concerning the authorship of two minor works previously attributed to Spinoza, one dealing with rainbows and the other with probability calculations. Michael John Petry argues that Spinoza is indeed the author of these works, and J. J. V. M. De Vet attributes them to Salomon Dierquens. While the question remains far from settled, these chapters offer a taste of the sort of problems faced by editors of Spinoza. Other contributions to this collection include an attempt by Johan Gerritsen to identify the first printers of Renati Des Cartes Principia philosophiae, Spinoza’s reworking of the first two parts of Descartes’s Principia, through an elaborate study of characteristic cracks and imperfections in type and ornamentation. While the issue is not settled, the paper presents an interesting overview of the techniques employed by small printing firms in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, as well as a window into the analytic complexities facing those concerned with identifying printers and publishers of early modern texts solely on the physical evidence of the books themselves. The volume also includes a study of the publication of Spinoza’s work in Germany in the nineteenth century, an inventory of copies of Spinoza’s Opera posthuma extant in the Netherlands, as well as reflections on the challenges of editing the correspondence of Hugo Grotius. This is a wide-ranging volume. While there is little of direct interest to historians of philosophy, there is much to hold the attention of those concerned with the production, transmission, and editing of early modern texts. W. H. BEARDSLEY University of Puget Sound