Willem van Blijenbergh was a Dutch grain broker who had authored a work condemning atheism and defending revealed religion in 1663, a year before beginning his correspondence with Spinoza. After reading Spinoza’s DPP and CM, he wrote and raised many awkward questions. The correspondence between the two men amounts to eight letters, four from each (Ep18–24, Ep27). Some commentators have suggested that Blijenbergh was obtuse. Although he surely was a frustrating interlocutor (Spinoza’s final letter, requesting him to desist from further correspondence, is a study in polite forbearance), contemporary scholars arguably should be grateful for his dogged persistence which resulted in Spinoza offering uncharacteristically detailed expositions of his views on the problem of evil, free will, sin, and the nature of God. Of course, these four topics are intimately interrelated, as these letters so brilliantly demonstrate.

There is a key translation issue with respect to fictio. In the Glossary to his translation of the Ethics, Edwin Curley notes:

Before adopting the nom de plume “George Eliot,” Marian Evans was an essayist, translator, and for a time, editor of the influential British journal the Westminster Review. From early adulthood she mixed in intellectually radical circles. She commenced, but probably did not complete, a translation of Spinoza’s TTP in 1843. Unfortunately, this draft translation is lost. Evans’s partner was George Henry Lewes who authored several favorable pieces on Spinoza’s philosophy in influential publications (e.g., Lewes 1845). Originally commissioned to translate Spinoza’s Ethics, Lewes passed the task to Evans which she completed in 1856. However, an argument between Lewes and the publisher prevented publication of her translation. Had it been published, it would have been the first English-language edition of the Ethics. Tragically, her translation was not published until 1981 and even then, in a very small circulation edition. It was not until 2020 that a widely available scholarly edition was published.

Spinoza’s ontology insists that human beings are fully “part” of nature, and as such both affect, and are affected by, other parts of nature. Some of these affects we experience as “passions,” which “follow from the same necessity and force of nature as the other singular things” (E3pref, ii/138). Spinoza defines affect as “affections of the body by which the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time, the ideas of these affections” (E3def3).

Among the many eminently quotable lines from the corpus of Sigmund Freud are those concerning his supposition about the response of the young girl when she first sees the penis of a sibling or playmate: “She makes her judgement and her decision in a flash. She has seen it and knows that she is without it and wants to have it.” Even if a generous reader were to grant Freud his contentious supposition, a question remains: what does the girl see, and judge, on a second, or a third, or even a fourth look? According to Simone de Beauvoir, Freud's judgment about the role anatomy plays in the formation of the psychic life of women is based on “a masculine model” and envy “could not arise from a simple anatomical comparison.” “[T]his outgrowth,” Beauvoir continues, “this weak little rod of flesh can in itself inspire [young girls] only with indifference, or even disgust. The little girl's covetousness, when it exists, results from a previous evaluation of virility. Freud takes this for granted, when it should be accounted for.”

Taking little for granted, Beauvoir argues that whether girls will judge the penis to be enviable, “insignificant, or even laughable” (SS 300) will depend on its importance, its symbolic and social value “within the totality of their lives.” In any event, whatever attitude a girl may adopt, “it is wrong to assert that a biological datum is concerned” (SS 307). Unlike Freud, Beauvoir endeavors to offer a comprehensive account of girls’ and women’s desires, attitudes, and judgments as these are formed within the totality of their always situated existences.