Ethics 2.0 is a web - based repository of the text of several versions of Spinoza's magnum opus. More importantly, however, this site provides various ways of representing the structure of the geometrical demonstrations of Spinoza's Ethics. This includes interactive text showing immediate ancestors and descendants for each element, tables that highlight element usage, graphs and other visualisations that aim to draw out bigger-picture connections, and multi-lingual multi-version advanced search.
The latest version of the project involves a reworked app and dataset, using React with NextJS. Future updates will include more interactivity and more useful data-analytic features. Eventually, I plan to add Spinoza's entire corpus, hopefully in at least Latin and English (and perhaps the rest of the Nagelate Schriften texts), at least to make it searchable.
Ultimately, this project will aim to extend the structured-data approach developed here from geometrical to non-geometrical philosophical texts. I consider this both an interesting and potentially useful pedagogical approach, a modern exploration of Spinoza's own use of the geometrical method (e.g., in his Descartes' Principles of Philosophy), and a new avenue for digital philosophy and scholarship more broadly.
Support this Project
If you appreciate the work I have done here, and would like to say thanks, or help support further development, please consider a donation.
Of course, I intend to keep this app and all of my work strictly free and available for students, scholars, and anyone else with an interest in Spinoza, Early Modern philosophy, digital humanities, philosophical methodology, etc.
Acknowledgments
This project owes a debt to a number of online resources that have come before it. In particular, Ron Bombardi's excellent hypertext version of the Elwes translation of the Ethics, the EthicaDB, the Ethica Help-Web, and various versions of the Latin, Dutch, and Elwes texts. Some of these may be more useful for specific purposes than others. My aim is to augment these resources by presenting Spinoza's thought according to my own order of thinking.
There are a number of difficulties with any formalization of Spinoza's use of the Geometrical Method that make it initially resistant to searchability or data-entry. Spinoza's idiosyncratic style often involves shorthand demonstrations of the form "This is demonstrated the same way as the previous proposition." In such cases, I have made these demonstrations explicit in the database.
I have also made editorial calls to fix / address a number of disputed cases according to the footnotes of Edwin Curley's translation. These cases are noted by an asterisk in the tables. Hopefully taking such liberties makes this site a useful addition to the online Spinoza universe.