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)

Spinoza’s bold claim that there exists only a single infinite substance entails that finite things pose a deep challenge: How can Spinoza account for their finitude and their plurality? Taking finite bodies as a test case for finite modes in general I articulate the necessary conditions for the existence of finite things. The key to my argument is the recognition that Spinoza’s account of finite bodies reflects both Cartesian and Hobbesian influences. This recognition leads to the surprising realization there must (...) be more to finite bodies than their finitude, a claim that goes well beyond the basic substance-monism claim, namely, that anything that is, is in God. This leads to the conclusion, which may seem paradoxical, that finite bodies have both an infinite as well as a finite aspect to them. Finite bodies, I argue, both actively partially determine all the other finite bodies, thereby partially causing their existence insofar as they are finite, as well as are determined by the totality of other bodies. I articulate precisely what this infinite aspect is and how it is distinct from the general substance-monism dictum. (shrink)

In this paper, I contend that Brandom’s interpretive oversights leave his inferentialist program vulnerable to Hegelian critique. My target is Brandom’s notion of “conceptual realism,” or the thesis that the structure of mind-independent reality mimics the structure of thought. I show, first, that the conceptual realism at the heart of Brandom’s empiricism finds root in his interpretation of Hegel. I then argue that conceptual realism is incompatible with Hegel’s thought, since the Jena Phenomenology, understood as a “way of despair,” includes (...) a critique of the philosophical framework upon which conceptual realism relies. Finally, I offer the Hegelian critique of Brandom that results from these textual infidelities. (shrink)

In the first part of the paper I reconstruct Kant’s proof of the existence of a ‘most real being’ while also highlighting the theory of modality that motivates Kant’s departure from Leibniz’s version of the proof. I go on to argue that it is precisely this departure that makes the being that falls out of the pre-critical proof look more like Spinoza’s extended natura naturans than an independent, personal creator-God. In the critical period, Kant seems to think that transcendental idealism (...) allows him to avoid this conclusion, but in the last section of the paper I argue that there is still one important version of the Spinozistic threat that remains. -/- . (shrink)

Clarke attacks Spinoza's monism on the grounds that it cannot explain how a multiplicity of things follows from one substance, God. This article argues that Clarke assumes that Spinoza's God is countable. It then sketches a way in which multiplicity can follow from God's uncountable nature.

Neste artigo vou avaliar a opinião a respeito das semelhanças entre a filosofia de Schopenhauer e aquela dos Idealistas Alemães. Recorrendo principalmente aos manuscritos de Schopenhauer anteriores à fase madura de sua filosofia, vou tentar mostrar que, apesar do arcabouço idealista-espinosista no qual ele teve que se acomodar, a filosofia de Schopenhauer difere radicalmente daquela dos Idealistas Alemães.

This thesis is a study of the relationship between 'nature' and 'spirit' in the philosophies of F.W.J. Schelling and G.W.F. Hegel. I aim to show that Schelling and Hegel are involved in a shared task of conceiving spiritual freedom as a necessary outcome of nature's inner, rational development. I argue that by interpreting spirit as 'emergent' from nature, the absolute idealists develop a 'third way' beyond Cartesian dualism and monist naturalism. For on the idealist account, nature and spirit are neither (...) ontologically discontinuous, as if separated by an insurmountable 'gap', nor are they identical, as if spirit were simply a 'second nature'. Rather, according to both Schelling and Hegel, spirit emerges from nature as its ontologically distinct and non-natural telos. What makes Schelling's and Hegel's philosophies of nature so unique, however, is not simply that they present spiritual freedom as dependent upon nature, but that the ontological specificity of spirit is shown to be rationally necessary. In fact, neither the early Schelling nor Hegel is concerned with the historical emergence of spirit. Rather, both philosophers see the 'emergence' of spirit as an atemporal feature of being that must be derived through sheer reason—be it Schelling’s method of 'depotentiation' or Hegel's dialectical logic. I therefore argue that by bracketing the question of historical emergence, Schelling and Hegel each develop a distinctive logic of emergence whereby spiritual freedom is shown to be necessary thanks to the ontological structure of the impersonal, natural world. In my concluding chapter, I consider Schelling's argument in his Berlin lectures of the 1840s that the idealist logic of emergence must be supplemented with a speculative consideration of historical emergence if philosophy is to be a complete science of reality. From this perspective, it looks as though both Hegel's and the early Schelling's 'logics of emergence', despite all their promise, presuppose the idea that nature's necessary stages need not express themselves in temporal succession in order for them to be fully realised. I conclude the thesis by suggesting that Schelling's Ages of the World was meant to overcome this apparent limit of the 'logic of emergence' without abandoning its fundamental aims. For in the Ages, nature's rationally necessary development is presented as unfolding in time, and time is understood as nothing other than the actual development of nature into spirit. (shrink)

This article starts by noting the general lack of acknowledgment of alternative traditions in the dominant western sustainability discourse in education. After critically analyzing the western human–nature relationship in the context of Enlightenment, modernity and colonial expansion, this article introduces two non-western ecological discourses from Eurasia and Asia, Noöspherism and Neo-Confucianism, which offer clear contrasts to the western sustainability framework. Using theoretical argumentations, the article goes on to examine the cosmological and ontological categories expounded by Vladimir Vernadsky of Russia and (...) Yulgok Yi of Korea, whose philosophical foundations with unique foci on the anthropocosmic and cosmoanthropic types of human–nature relationships could well be alternatives and/or additions to the dominant western discourse. The article concludes with a twofold comparison: between Eurasian and Confucian heritages, and these two with the mainstream western ecological discourse. (shrink)