This paper explores Spinoza’s therapy of passions and method of salvation through knowledge and love of God. His optimism about this method is perplexing: it is not even clear how his God, who is unlike any traditional notion of divinity, can be loved. Sorting out Spinoza’s view involves distinguishing an ethics of bondage from another of freedom, and two corresponding notions of love of God. The paper argues that the highest kind of love—‘pure intellectual love of God’—should not be understood (...) as an affect at all, but instead as unimpeded intellectual activity. This suggestion requires reconsidering Spinoza’s account of cognition, particularly his use of the Cartesian notions of objective and formal reality which are not only central to his theory of ideas but constitute the foundations of his salvation project. (shrink)

Este artigo busca interpretar a gravura "Melancolia I", do renascentista alemão Albrecht Dürer, segundo o pano de fundo filosófico do pensamento de Spinoza. A ideia central é a de que, nessa gravura, haveria uma intuição artístico-filosófica pela qual Dürer foi levado a associar a tristeza melancólica à ideia de um conhecimento confuso e turvado pela imaginação. Tal intuição se completaria numa outra gravura, criada no mesmo ano, o "São Jerônimo em seu gabinete", na qual a melancolia do "homem de cultura" (...) renascentista desaparece. Tais intuições permitiriam ler as duas gravuras sob a ótica das "teorias" da mente e do conhecimento de Spinoza, para quem o conhecimento está associado à alegria, desde que esteja livre das sombras da imaginação projetadas pelo medo, pelo desejo excessivo, pelas crenças ou pelas superstições. This article seeks to interpret the engraving "Melencolia I" , made by the German Renaissance’s painter Albrecht Dürer, according to the philosophical background of Spinoza’s thought. The central idea is that, in this picture, there would be an artistic-philosophical intuition by which Dürer associated melancholy to the idea of a confused and muddied knowledge caused by imagination. Another engraving, also created in 1514, completes this intuition: "St. Jerome in his study", in which the melancholy of the Renaissance’s "man of culture" disappears. Such insights allow reading the two pictures from the perspective of Spinoza’s "theories" of mind and knowledge. He assumes that knowledge is associated with joy, since it is free from the shadows of the imagination projected by fear, excessive desire, beliefs or/and superstitions. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationship between violence and the domination of speech in Spinoza’s political thought. Spinoza describes the cost of such violence to the State, to the collective epistemic resources, and to the members of the polity that domination aims to script and silence. Spinoza shows how obedience to a dominating power requires pretense and deception. The pressure to pretend is the linchpin of an account of how oppression severely degrades the conditions for meaningful communication, and thus the possibilities (...) for thinking and acting in common. Because it belongs to human nature to desire to share our thoughts with others, Spinoza believes that most people experience efforts to control our communication to be acutely intolerable. As a result, such unbearable violence threatens the political order that deploys it. I conclude with some speculative remarks about why, in the Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza consistently deploys the superlative form of the adjective violentus in reference to the domination of thought and speech rather than to other modes of political violence. (shrink)

This article focuses on three of the affects discussed in Spinoza’s Ethics: pride, esteem, and scorn. At first, it focuses mainly on the delusional aspect Spinoza attributes to these passions as a matter of definition, emphasizing the monological and self-referential dimension in which they seem to imprison the subject. It then analyzes the reference to a notion of justice contained in their definitions, and how this triggers a struggle for recognition. In a third moment, it highlights the political efficacy of (...) these affects in producing not only conflict but also social bonds. Finally, it concludes by considering how Spinoza’s treatment of these affects fits within the framework of the more general problem of the relationship between passion and reason. (shrink)

Spinoza distinguishes two orders of knowledge: an order conceived by the intellect, that is, the necessary order of nature and another order conceived by the imagination, that is, the common order of nature in which the contingent and the possible dwell. However, the common order is not only a deprivation of knowledge, but also a reality for the finite mode. Because we cannot exclude the existence of the common order, this paper attempts to understand how we can reconcile it with (...) the necessary order. Spinoza’s critique of imagination is that it introduces fragmentation and discontinuity into nature, since it is a kind of knowledge that does not realize the basis of this continuity: the necessary order. Through an analysis of time as a product of imagination, we will try to show how it introduces the idea of contingency and consequently that of possible. Just as time, the common order can be grasped by reason as an outer frame, it will no longer be an obstacle to the necessary chain of things in the necessary order. It is through the necessary order that we can realize the necessity that underlies the production of time, possible, and contingency as the corruptibility of all particular things. (shrink)

In the Ethics Spinoza defines certain traditional virtues such as humility and repentance as species of sadness and denies that they are virtues. He nonetheless holds that they can turn out to be useful as a means towards virtue—in fact, the greatest virtue of blessedness—in the life of someone who is not guided by reason. In this paper, I examine Spinoza’s relatively overlooked claim regarding the usefulness of sad passions as a means towards blessedness. In taking up Spinoza’s treatment of (...) humility as my case study, I show that there is a tension between this claim and his other explicit commitments in the Ethics. More specifically, after considering his views regarding the consequences of humility—including, most notably, its susceptibility to envy—and conditions of achieving blessedness, I show that humility cannot effectively be said to bring about cooperation and push “weak-minded” people in the right direction so that, in the end, they may be free and enjoy blessedness. I conclude by suggesting that if we must rely on passions as a means towards virtue in the Spinozistic universe, we must rely not on debilitating sad passions such as humility, but on joy-based social passions such as love. -/- . (shrink)

The recent expansion of the English academies programme has initiated a period of significant change within the state education system. As established administration has been disrupted, new providers from business and philanthropy have entered the sector with a range of approaches to transform schools. This paper examines the development of co-operative schools, which are positioned as an ‘ethical alternative’ within the system and have proved popular with teachers and parents. Using a theory of co-operative power drawn from the philosophy of (...) Spinoza, the author explores how co-operative schools have emerged, with and against the reforming agenda, using narratives of hope and resistance. Spinoza provides theoretical resources to critique this positioning and to project beyond the limiting narratives to an affirmative vision for co-operative schools. (shrink)

In Spinoza, what I call the ‘Being Individual Multiple’ is the multitudo. Its form of life is Democracy, understood as the autonomous and conflictual organization of collective dynamics and not one form of government among others. Combining an original mode of argumentation with a critical discussion of opposing interpretations, I maintain that democracy is the translation into politics of the third and highest kind of knowledge in Spinoza, intuitive science. I argue moreover that the multitudo self-organized in a democracy has (...) the capacity to experiment and express a different rationality with respect to the singular individual. Wisdom and democracy thus converge to give life to something unknown and original in western political modernity. (shrink)

Against much of the philosophical tradition, Spinoza and Nietzsche defend an understanding of freedom opposed to free will and formulated as an ethical ideal consisting in a transition from a smaller to a greater power of acting. Starting from a shared commitment to necessity and radical immanence, they present freedom as a passage to a greater power of self-determination and self-expression of the body. Nevertheless, the continuities between their power ontologies and their respective commitments to a life of knowledge break (...) down in their discussion of the various possible manifestations of power. I will argue that Nietzsche's distinctive formulation of power as struggle between wills to power enables him to formulate the question of the qualitative dimension of empowerment in a way that is foreign to Spinoza's rational determinism. While acknowledging the profound similarities, I will argue that we must see Nietzsche's discussion of affirmation as the culmination of his disagreement with his predecessor on the topic of freedom and empowerment. (shrink)

The goal of this article is to reveal the primal role played by “use” in Spinoza's Ethics. Contrary to appearances, the concept is not linked only to passivity; it is an essential feature of the reinforcement of virtue toward wisdom. Considering that Laurent Bove's analyses of habit within the realm of imagination leave aside the links with adequate knowledge, this article offers an extension of his interpretation in a completely new direction. The new elements are, above all, a demonstration of (...) the place of “use” in the texts where the shift from passivity to activity is concerned, and a new interpretation of intuition in the example of the discovery of the fourth proportional number. In this example, it is argued that intuition is simply a mechanical habituation to truth, thanks to the repetition of acts of reasoning. (shrink)

O presente artigo, tem como objetivo apresentar a maneira pela qual Hobbes e Espinosa entendem a multidão, elucidando, a partir disso o papel que conferem a ela na instituição do Estado. Parte-se do pressuposto de que tanto num pensador quanto no outro, a multidão tem um papel central no que diz respeito à instituição do estado civil, de maneira que, por vias distintas, tal instituição somente pode ser pensada a partir dela. Como se observa, os dois pensadores têm maneiras totalmente (...) díspares de conceber a multidão – enquanto em um ela necessariamente precisa ser unificada por meio da representação, no outro o sujeito político instituinte é justamente a multidão tomada em sua pluralidade –, do que se segue que somos colocados diante de duas concepções distintas de Estado. (shrink)

RESUMO O texto propõe um retorno a alguns conceitos e filósofos relevantes para o debate sobre o contrato social no século XVII: a partir de certos princípios sobre os quais se assenta o alcance inovador e crítico da teoria hobbesiana, e vendo no contrato social um suporte causal para o entendimento e a intervenção política, procuro compreender em que sentido o conceito de transferência deve convir ao de poder absoluto do soberano e o que isso implica de crítica à ideia (...) de direito de resistência, como o entendia Althusius, e de defesa de uma ruptura radical entre tempos de guerra e de paz. Reconstruo com essa crítica a tese hobbesiana da obediência como fundamento da permanência da Cidade - e algumas consequências disso; finalmente, proponho uma hipótese sobre a obra de Espinosa que permita a desconstrução das ideias de transferência e de contrato, dentro de um campo de causalidade que põe o conflito e a resistência como constitutivos da própria sociabilidade, sem o essencial recurso ao conceito althusiano de representação, e sem o fundo despolitizador presente na teoria de Hobbes. ABSTRACT The text proposes a return to some relevant concepts and philosophers to debate about the social contract in the XVII century: from certain principles on which is based the innovative and critical reach of Hobbes's theory, and seeing in the social contract a causal support for political understanding and intervention, I seek to understand in what sense the concept of transference must agree with to that of absolute sovereign's power and how it implies a criticism to the ideia of right of resistance, as understood Althusius, and how it implies a defense of a radical break between times of war and peace. I rebuild, with this critique, the hobbesian thesis of obedience as foundation of permanence of the City - and some consequences of it. Finally, I propose a hypothesis about Spinoza's work that allows the deconstruction of transfer ideas and contract, within a causal field that puts the conflict and the resistance as constitutive items of sociability itself, without the essential resource to the althusian concept of representation and without the depoliticized background present in Hobbes's theory. (shrink)

Este trabalho tem o escopo de investigar o conceito de Direito de Resistência em Baruch de Spinoza, através da sua obra Tratado Político e de seus comentadores. Inicialmente a resistência é apresentada em diferentes visões, Hobbes e Locke, seguida pela tradição hegemônica da filosofia política e logo contraposta ao conceito de Desobediência Civil. Em seguida, Spinoza surge com sua perspectiva inovadora, não diferenciando resistir de obedecer, caso certas circunstâncias se apresentem no ambiente político, a partir de uma breve contextualização e (...) análise do fundamento da Resistência neste autor, a potência da multidão. Por fim, busca-se o Decreto nº 8243/14 para submetê-lo a seguinte questão: pode este ser visto como uma institucionalização da Resistência, nos termos espinosanos? (shrink)

The opposition between constraint and free necessity leads Spinoza's commentators to conceive of ethical liberation as a reconciliation with one's self against alienations due to external causes, and to confuse constraint with contrariety. Analysis of the word coactus in Spinoza's works shows that finite modes can't exist and can't free themselves without constraints, which are not always a source of contrariety. Such an analysis is close to those of Émile Durkheim and Pierre Bourdieu.

Publicado em 2014, "Albert Camus, de la transfiguration", constitui, ao lado de “Vauvenargues ou le séditieux”, de 2010, mais um esforço realizado por Laurent Bove no sentido de valorizar o tema pascaliano da “segunda natureza” através de um ponto de vista espinosista. Por aí se vê que Bove é consequente ao se distanciar tanto do tema da “filosofia do absurdo”, reiteradas vezes associada à obra de Camus pela interpretação hegemônica que dele se faz, quanto da imagem de um moralista, associada (...) a Camus através de Sartre. Ainda que Bove percorra grande parte da obra Camus, podemos afirmar sem grandes embaraços que os personagens merecedores de maior consideração são Meursault e o Cristo das pinturas de Piero della Francesca, tal como descrito nas Noces. Através da identificação do tema de uma filosofia do corpo, Bove sustenta que Camus prepara, nas suas primeiras obras, notadamente em O estrangeiro e nas Noces, a questão da transfiguração, a qual será posteriormente desdobrada nos seus aspectos políticos e históricos, em O homem revoltado, por aí se articulam as duas partes da obra de Bove. (shrink)