Philosophy Books in Threes
T his is nothing groundbreaking, but I want to call attention to the fact that three heroes of the naturalist tradition (or so I would call them), Lucretius, Spinoza, and Hume, seem to employ a more or less three-part strategy when expounding their philosophy in their major works. Hume’s case is the most obvious, where his A Treatise of Human Nature is split into three books: one on the understanding, one on the passions, and one on ethics and justice. The structure of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura is similar. The work is in six books, with the first two dealing with Epicurean atomic physics, the second two dealing with human life and the mind, and the last two taking up the universe at large (including mankind’s place in it). Lastly, there’s Spinoza’s Ethics , where the first part expounds Spinoza’s basic ontology, the second part concerning the theory of knowledge and the philosophy of mind, and parts three, four, and five dealing with moral psychology and e...