In the Preface to Part Four of the Ethics, Spinoza offers the reader an exemplar of human nature. However, Spinoza does not conceive of human nature as a universal in which each human being participates, simply by virtue of being human. Rather, each human being is conceived as singular. Thriving individual lives assume thriving communities composed of (somewhat) like-minded and (somewhat) like-embodied individuals. The model, or exemplar, then, may be considered to play the role of an enabling fiction in his (...) educational and moral philosophy. The approach taken here is to explore Spinoza’s notions of singularity, similarity, and exemplarity in relation to the distinctive human capacity to educate the senses and the passions and to cultivate reason, and thereby to flourish. The final section of the paper reads the education of Victor Frankenstein’s ‘monster’ through the lens of Spinoza’s philosophy of affect. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Are there limits to the ability of Spinoza’s philosophy to speak to our present? Perhaps his notion of ‘the mind of God’ is too foreign for contemporary sensibilities to contemplate? After offering a brief refutation of Spinoza as atheist or pantheist, I venture the idea that contemporary understandings of nature may benefit from a consideration of Spinoza’s account of ‘God or Nature’. I suggest that the expression of the virtue of fortitudo (strength of character) can be (re)conceived as the (...) love of God, or Nature. (shrink)

Benedict Spinoza (1632–1677) is often characterised in the history of philosophy as the rationalist philosopher par excellence. However, much contemporary critical interpretation of his thought has...

The purpose of this article is to add to the debate on the normative status and legitimacy of indoctrination in education by drawing on the political philosophy of Benedict Spinoza (1632–1677). More specifically, I will argue that Spinoza’s relational approach to knowledge formation and autonomy, in light of his understanding of the natural limitations of human cognition, provides us with valuable hints for staking out a more productive path ahead for the debate on indoctrination. This article combines an investigation into (...) the early modern history of political ideas with a philosophical inquiry into a persistent conceptual problem residing at the heart of education. As such, the aim of the article is ultimately to offer an account of indoctrination less fraught with the dangers of epistemological and political idealism that often haunt rival conceptions. (shrink)

Over the last years, some of Spinoza studies have shifted to a consideration of the relational character of his ethics by focusing on the notion of autonomy. This concept is foreign to Spinoza's vocabulary. Therefore, I will attempt to explain what Spinozan relational autonomy is and its connection with the most important ethical concept in his philosophy: freedom. Following considerations about Spinozan freedom, I claim that it entails a relational character and that, for this reason, it is equal to relational (...) autonomy. We are free when our joint action is based on adequate ideas of what we have in common with others. (shrink)