Arnold Geulincx Ethics: With Samuel Beckett's Notes(146 Brill's Texts and Sources in Intellectual History)

Arnold Geulincx (1624-1669) is a key figure in the history of ideas, whose concepts have been seen as precursors to those developed by Spinoza, Malebranche, Leibniz and Kant.
His Ethics presents a treatment of virtue from the standpoint of occasionalist metaphysics. The great Irish writer Samuel Beckett stated that Geulincx, with his emphasis on the powerlessness and ignorance of the human condition, was a key influence on his works. This is the first complete version of the text to appear in a modern language. It includes the full text of the Ethics and Beckett’s notes to his reading of Geulincx.
Shedding new light on important moments of intellectual history, it is a major event for students of philosophy and literature.

Brill's Texts and Sources in Intellectual History, vol. 1

About the Author :
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).

Review :
"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