Arnold Geulincx Ethics

Han (J.A.) van Ruler, Ph.D. (1995) in Philosophy, University of Groningen, is Head of the NWO-project From Erasmus to Spinoza at Erasmus University, Rotterdam. His publications include The Crisis of Causality: Voetius and Descartes on God, Nature and Change (Brill, 1995).

Anthony Uhlmann is Associate Professor in Humanities and Languages at the University of Western Sydney. He has published extensively on the work of Samuel Beckett. He is the author of Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image (Cambridge UP, 2006) a work which considers Beckett's debt to Geulincx in detail.

Martin Wilson is a writer and publisher. His most recent work was an English translation of the Metaphysics of Arnold Geulincx (1999).

The book will be of great importance to those interested in the history of early-modern philosophy, the history of ethics, Spinozism, and related fields such as the psychology of religion, as well as to scholars and readers of Beckett.

"Becketts lateinische Exzerpte liegen nun zum ersten Mal vollständig auf Englisch vor, und zwar als Anhang zu einer Übersetzung von Geulincx' «Ethik» selbst. Der flämische Philosoph und der irische Schriftsteller bilden fürwahr ein merkwürdiges Paar. Was sie verbindet, ist weder die Tugend noch der Gottesbegriff, sondern die Suche nach einer Rechtfertigung der Lebensbejahung. (...) Dieses Wiegengleichnis, das Geulincx makabrerweise in seinem Beweis der Unmöglichkeit von Selbstmord entwickelt, hat Beckett besonders beeindruckt, und er hat es in verschiedenen Werken – für seine erwachsenen Romanfiguren und Schauspieler zum Schaukelstuhl umgeformt – auf durchaus geulincxsche Manier eingesetzt."
Christoph Lüthy, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

"Geulincx's Ethics (1675) occupies an ambivalent stage between the mechanistic drift of Descartes' mind/body dualism and Spinoza's atheism. Its reputation during the 20th century has been largely attributable to Samuel Beckett's fascination with it and the radical Cartesian "Occasionalists" generally. This thoughtful, timely translation includes most of Beckett's manuscript notes to Geulincx. Most impressive in Ethics is the unique mode of speculative writing that Geulincx invents to argue and exemplify his experience of what might be called an ethics of non-knowledge. (…) As Beckett recognized, Geulincx's God is a figure for the absolute irreducibility of not-knowing that disrupts all acts of reflection-ethical and metaphysical. A brilliant volume. Summing Up: Highly recommended."
N. Lukacher, University of Illinois at Chicago, Choice

Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Translator’s Preface
Introduction
On this Edition, Annotations and Editors’ Notes

Ethics
To the Curators of the University of Leiden
Gracious Reader
Treatise I. On Virtue and its Prime Attributes
Treatise II. On the Virtues Commonly Called Particular
Treatise III. On the End and the Good
Treatise IV. On the Passions
Treatise V. On the Reward of Virtue
Treatise VI. On Prudence
Annotations to the Ethics

Introduction to Beckett’s Notes to the Ethics
Samuel Beckett’s Notes to His Reading of the Ethics by Arnold Geulincx

Bibliography
Index