Curing Pansophiathrough Eruditum Nescire: Bernard Nieuwentijt’s (1654–1718) Epistemology of Modesty

Baruch Spinoza’s (1632–77)Tractatus theologico-politicus(1669 or 1670) caused outrage across the Dutch Republic, for it obliterated the carefully installed separation between philosophy and theology. The posthumous publication of Spinoza’s Ethica, which is contained in his Opera posthuma(1677), caused similar consternation. It was especially the mathematical order in which the Ethicawas composed that caused fierce opposition, for its mathematical appearance gave the impression that Spinoza’s heretical teachings were established demonstratively. In this essay, I document how the Dutch physician, local politician, and amateur mathematician and experimenter Bernard Nieuwentijt (1654–1718) attempted to physico-mathematically and methodologically counter the threats posed by Spinoza’s program. Nieuwentijt tried to defend the authority of the scriptures in times at which they came under attack by the new philosophy and by the emerging sciences that were gradually winning terrain. The crux of his defense consisted in delineating a modest epistemology, a “learned ignorance,” that would cure Spinoza’s followers of their pansophical aspirations, on the one hand, and remove the conflict between the Bible and reason, on the other. The specific way in which he sought to accomplish this distinguished him from Dutch Reformed thought, or so I will argue.