In response to Susan James’s ‘Spinoza and the poetic imagination,’ this essay illustrates how Spinoza and his interlocutors in the artistic society Nil Volentibus Arduum developed approaches to art and its social and political utility in conversation with Aristotle’s Poetics, as well as with its early modern translations, redactions, and applications. They, in turn, developed a poetry and a poetics grounded in the philosophical apprehension of nature, emphasizing vraisemblance or probability and necessity; foregrounding the careers of the affects; and affording (...) critics the ability to mobilize pleasure to their advantage and to shape audiences—a classicist project. (shrink)

This paper explores Spinoza’s relationship to poetry by considering two prominent allusions to classical literature in Spinoza’s political treatises. Susan James illuminates Spinoza’s worries about the dangers of poetic address. At the same time, Spinoza relies on poetic language and citation to press some central claims. References to Seneca and Tacitus, I suggest, aim to transform the popular imagination with respect to the relationship between government, violence, and domination. Poetic language reinforces his challenge to false solutions to the problems of (...) violence, rebellion, and the precarity of political authority, which preoccupied early-modern political thinkers. (shrink)

The paper argues that Spinoza may have deepened his conception of poetry as not only a resource for the understanding but as the highest peak of the understanding. I begin by reviewing selected literature on Spinoza’s views on language and show how Spinoza’s presentation of his philosophy builds on a conception of what language can do. I then make a succinct case for a reading of Ethics Part 5 Proposition 24, where we find an attempt at a poetic expression of (...) thought, as Spinoza explores what he considers the highest form of knowledge: intuitive science. (shrink)

Ostensibly, this volume is about the relationship between the poetic imagination and philosophical thought in Spinoza’s writings, the contours of which are brilliantly defined in Susan James’s targ...

These eight generous commentaries raise an inspiring array of questions about the relationship between philosophy and poetry as it was viewed by Spinoza and his contemporaries. Taken singly and tog...

Drawing on Spinoza’s insights and responding to James’s analysis, I argue that the possibility of a more equal and productive partnership between poetry and philosophy may only be realizable when the resources of each are brought to bear on a common problem external to both. I support this contention by considering how, in Kim Stanley Robinson’s climate fiction novel, The Ministry for the Future, philosophical reasoning about the causes of the current climate crisis is combined with the poetic imagination of (...) a possible climate future for the purposes of motivating readers to put their understanding of what it is rational to do into practice. Finally, I suggest that the formal flexibility of the literary genre grants it a certain privilege over philosophical modes of communication insofar as it allows it to stage the relation between the poetic and the philosophical within its own boundaries. (shrink)

James proposes that imagination plays a positive role throughout Spinoza’s works, and that it is continuous in his metaphysical and political works. In the Political Treatise, Spinoza argues that politics needs no creative imagination. History, he argues, has given us all the examples we need, and we should not use our imaginations to think up new ones. I will examine Spinoza’s ban on the use of the imagination for politics to see if James’s claims of continuity are challenged. Rather than (...) limit the imagination, Spinoza seeks to encourage us to study historical examples and gain that knowledge of the past experience upon which the imagination works. (shrink)

James articulates and defends a Spinozist view of the interplay between poetry and philosophy: philosophy has an ineliminably poetic content, and poetry is an aid and support to philosophy. In this piece, I juxtapose James’s Spinozist schema with another schema available within Spinoza’s historical milieu. In Ibn Tufayl’s view, rather than poetry being an aid to philosophy, poetry opens to a world of experience that even the best philosophy cannot grasp. For flat-footed philosophers who think that philosophy can in principle (...) have the last word on everything, poetics might give an approximate indication of a kind of experience that lies beyond it. (shrink)

This paper outlines Susan James’s analysis of Spinoza’s conception of practical imagination. It argues that there are three problems with her account. 1) The historical location James gives for the supposed shift away from rhetorical communication to egalitarian reasoning is problematic. 2) James uses the term ‘persuasion’ to describe both rational argumentation and rhetorical appeal to emotion as their genus or common denominator. 3) She relies on the traditional opposition between rhetorical capture of the mind through emotionally charged images and (...) empowerment of the mind through reasoning. (shrink)