En una carta del 20 de julio de 1664 Spinoza le relata a su amigo Peter Balling un sueño con “cierto brasileño, negro y sarnoso”. Tal vez sea esa la única mención en la obra spinozista que refiere al Nuevo Mundo, donde Holanda poseía colonias. A partir de ese sueño, el presente trabajo inquiere sobre la coexistencia de las filosofías modernas de la libertad con la esclavitud real de miles de seres humanos en América, y en particular sobre el silencio (...) de Spinoza en relación con la trata de esclavos africanos en tierras americanas. (shrink)

Through an examination of his remarks on Genesis, chapters 2–3, I will demonstrate that Spinoza’s argument for sexual inequality is not only an aberration,but a symmetrical inversion of a view he propounds, albeit implicitly, in his Ethics. In particular, “the black page” of his Political Treatise ignores, along with the intellectual capacities of women, the immeasurable benefits of affectionate partnership between a man and a woman that he extols in his retelling of the Genesis narrative. If the doctrine of the (...) black page maintains that it is the dependency of wives upon their husbands that explains their weakness and justifies their exclusion from formal roles in politics, his unusual narrative of the Fall illustrates that it is precisely Adam's lack of appreciation of his need for his wife that accounts for his imbecility. (shrink)

The “black page” in Spinoza’s Political Treatise has been much discussed and interpreted. These can be roughly divided into three groups: Approaches that see the “black page” as an extension of Spinoza’s theory of the passions and imagination; approaches that maintain that Spinoza excluded women from politics not because of their innate weaknesses but because of their social conditions; approaches that maintain that he excluded women because he saw them as weaker beings, but this contradicts his certain accounts, especially in (...) the Ethics. In this paper, I take the latter view. My contribution is to argue that this contradiction is not unique to the Ethics. I pursue my reading along two lines, one ontological and one political. In the first, I focus on the continuity between the Ethics and the Political Treatise and show that the “black page” is also inconsistent with the ontology and methodology of the Political Treatise itself. In the second, I argue that the exclusion of women also contradicts the concept of the political absolute developed in this last work, since this concept problematizes any kind of exclusion and provides for political stability the strategic principle of increasing the number of decision-makers as much as possible. (shrink)

O presente texto procura trabalhar algumas acepções do conceito de corpo em Espinosa atendendo aos seus aspectos físicos, psíquicos, metafísicos e políticos. Também toma em conta a dupla condição do corpo - enquanto existente na duração e enquanto pensado por Deus. A noção de "conatus", presente em todos os corpos, é pretexto para lembrar a recente obra de António Damásio, A Estranha Ordem das Coisas e para comparar a potencia individual que habita os indivíduos com a potencia política que existe (...) nas sociedades. é nessa perspectiva que se analisa o modo como o lósofo considera a condição feminina. tentando-se perceber a severidade com que ele encara a actuação das mulheres no corpo político. Sobre esta temática apresentam-se os posicionamentos de algumas lósofas feministas apreciando- se criticamente as suas teses. O texto termina com a interrogação "Estará vedado às mulheres o "amor intellectualis Dei"?", sustentando que no livro V da ética encontramos elementos que asseguram às mulheres uma salvação de pleno direito, sem que para tal tenham que renunciar ao seu corpo. (shrink)

Object of intense discussion among Spinoza’s interpreters, the unfinished chapter XI of the Political Treatise presents what seems to be the reasons of the exclusion of women in democracy. Opposed to this interpretation, we aim to show the presence of the “counterdiscourse” in the concerned passage. At the end, we stress that this problem allows todiscerne how the notions of myth and history are linked in Spinoza.