166. - Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being

Summary

The Korte Verhandeling, van God, de Mensch, en deszelvs Welstand probably dates from the early 1660s. According to Filippo Mignini’s reconstruction (Mignini 1986a), which is generally accepted, Spinoza originally wrote the text in Latin and circulated it among his friends around late 1660. He continued to revise and add to the text in response to their feedback. At some point they produced a Dutch translation with notes and cross-references, which Spinoza probably also corrected and supplemented. By early 1662, however, he had abandoned the work in favor of the Ethics. Never published in his lifetime or in the Opera posthuma, the KV was essentially lost until two Dutch copies were discovered in the mid nineteenth century (for details, see Wolf 1910, ciii–cxx). The earlier of the two, known as Codex A, dates from the late seventeenth century and is treated as authoritative in the most recent critical edition (Spinoza 1986; slightly updated in Spinoza 2009), while Codex B, from the mid eighteenth century, is principally a revised copy of A.