In this paper I offer three main challenges to James (2011). All three turn on the nature of philosophy and secure knowledge in Spinoza. First, I criticize James's account of the epistemic role that experience plays in securing adequate ideas for Spinoza. In doing so I criticize her treatment of what is known as the ‘conatus doctrine’ in Spinoza in order to challenge her picture of the relationship between true religion and philosophy. Second, this leads me into a criticism of (...) her account of the nature of philosophy in Spinoza. I argue it is less piecemeal and less akin to what we would recognize as ‘science’ than she suggests. Third, I argue against James's core commitment that Spinoza's three kinds of knowledge differ in degree; I claim they differ in kind. My argument will offer a new interpretation of Spinoza's conception of ‘common notions’. Moreover, I argue that Spinozistic adequate knowledge involves something akin to angelic disembodiment. (shrink)

Scholars have begun to explore Baruch Spinozas critique of rationalism, largely because of his importance for later thinkers deeply concerned about the nature of body, including Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, Frankfurt school critical theorists, and feminists. Until now, however, Spinozas epistemological writings have not been properly addressed in this revival of interest in his materialism. My dissertation reconstructs Spinozas materialist method of knowing in an effort to reclaim it from Cartesian and idealist readings, offering instead a materialist reading of Spinozas epistemological (...) writings that shows him as the first serious critic of modern rationalism. Contrary to the predominant reading of Spinoza in Anglo-American philosophy, which presents him as a metaphysician dependent on Cartesian epistemology, I argue that Spinoza offers something separate, akin to an epistemology, that distinguishes him from the Cartesian model and allows him to critique it. The dissertation explores how Spinozas method of knowing must involve material conditions, including concrete history, psychology, society, and politics, that are experienced through the body and that render a purely mental criterion for knowledge impossible. (shrink)

Scholarship on Emerson to date has not considered Spinoza’s influence upon his thought. Indeed, from his lifetime until the twentieth century, Emerson’s friends and disciples engaged in a concerted cover-up because of Spinoza’s hated name. However, Emerson mentioned his respect and admiration of Spinoza in his journals, letters, lectures, and essays, and Emerson’s thought clearly shows an importation of ideas central to Spinoza’s system of metaphysics, ethics, and biblical hermeneutics. In this essay, I undertake a biographical and philosophical study in (...) order to show the extent of Spinoza’s influence on Emerson and how this changes the traditional understanding of Emerson’s thought. (shrink)

This article concerns the notion of living bodies that Spinoza develops in the Ethics (published posthumously in 1677). While commentators have emphasized the relevance of Spinoza’s works for contemporary physiology, they have neglected to study Spinoza’s own views on this topic. My aim is to draw attention to the specific parti pris that underlies Spinoza’s passages on anatomy. To do so, I first compare Spinoza’s claims on human body with the conceptions developed in his immediate historical environment. Then, I propose (...) to draw a parallel between Lakatos’s notion of “negative heuristics” and the high level of generalization Spinoza demonstrates in his propositions on the human body. This parallel allows me to show how Spinoza’s critical remarks on our knowledge of human body have heuristic value. (shrink)

In this contribution, Balibar follows his seminal 1993 work applying the notion of the transindividual to Spinoza’s work, to produce a broader history of thinking the transindividual that brings both Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud into relation with Spinoza, devoting a section to each of these thinkers. Balibar positions the notion of the transindividual, here, as a solution to the opposing ontological errors of philosophical individualism that fails to attend to the social constitution of the individual, and the social organicism (...) that reduces the individual to the effect of larger forces. For Balibar, following Gilbert Simondon, the individual is to be understood as always already extending beyond themselves. (shrink)

This paper explores a methodological lineage among French Spinoza scholars which can be traced back to texts written by Victor Delbos (1862–1916), which later branched out into two diametrically opposed orientations in the work by Martial Gueroult (1891–1976) and Paul Vernière (1916–1997), only to be reunited reflexively in the more recent work by Pierre-François Moreau (1948-). The aim is mostly to offer an original reconstruction of the way in which Delbos’ historical programme was inherited by subsequent Spinoza scholars. While retracing (...) this lineage, my focus will be on a specific historiographical principle first formulated by Delbos. In the conclusion, however, I briefly turn to Spinoza himself, arguing how this reconstituted family of twentieth century French historians of philosophy can be characterized as a form of ‘Historiographical Spinozism’. (shrink)

Instead of reading Spinoza's account of the imagination in an anthropocentric way, as dependent on the traditional doctrine of human faculties, the author considers it as a consequence of his physics and cosmology. Knowledge by signs, as Spinoza calls imagination, has to be rooted in his theory of marks and images, and concerns all beings (human and non human) that are capable of marking and being marked by other bodies in the infinite semiosis of nature.

Se analizan los más tradicionales aspectos vinculados a la teoría política spinozista, la teoría del contrato y la crítica de la religión, en estrecha relación con la Ética y con el tratamiento de las relaciones entre afectos e imaginación, que se considera como el núcleo de su pensamiento político. Se interpreta así la idea de conatus desde una doble dimensión, política y ontológica, cuya articulación con las otras categorías recogidas en la Ética, especialmente con relación a los afectos, ofrece una (...) alternativa al pensamiento de la omnipotencia, dominante en la mayor parte de las filosofías de la modernidad. (shrink)

This paper aims at reconstructing the ethical issues raised by Spinoza's earlyTreatise on the Emendation of the Intellect. Specifically, I argue that Spinoza takes issue with Descartes’ epistemology in order to support a form of “ethical intellectualism” in which knowledge is envisaged as both necessary and sufficient to reach the supreme good. First, I reconstruct how Descartes exploits the distinction between truth and certainty in hisDiscourse on the Method. On the one hand, this distinction acts as the basis for Descartes’ (...) epistemological rules while, on the other hand, it implies a “morale par provision” in which adequate knowledge is not strictly necessary to practice virtue. Second, I show that Spinoza rejects the distinction between truth and certainty and thus the methodological doubt. This move leads Spinoza to substitute the Cartesian Cogito with the idea of God as the only adequate standard of knowledge, through which the mind can attain the rules to reach the supreme good. Third, I demonstrate that in theShort TreatiseSpinoza develops this view by equating intellect and will and thus maintaining that only adequate knowledge can help to contrast affects. However, I also insist that Spinoza's early epistemology is unable to explain why human beings drop conceive of the idea of God inadequately. Thus, I suggest that in his later writings Spinoza accounts for the insufficiency of adequate knowledge in opposing the power of the imagination and passions by reconnecting the nature of ideas with the mind's conatus. (shrink)