But in 1670...

But in 1670, no one could have foreseen just how deep the rift between the two sets of aspirations, one to improve the human condition through applied science and technology, the analysis and reconstitution of the material, the other to improve it by transcendence of the material could become. For if truth is one, why should not old truths be consistent in the long run with new truths? Can history reverse itself?

That is to say, can there be any unification in philosophy of those aspirations as Spinoza thought there could be? Or any metaphysics dedicated to one quite independently of the other that can exist in harmony with the sciences of the material as Sadra thought?

If the scholarly losses I referred to at the start are just one of the visible consequences of this rift that opened up when Spinoza failed to complete his project, it is perhaps reasonable to hope that repairing those losses might help us with the the larger problem from which they stem. Previous…