ABSTRACTFor Dōgen, the Buddhist doctrine of “no self” ultimately presents the self as contextualized. The self is for him not an independent entity, but is intricately related to its environment, determined through the many beings around it. In a quite different philosophical setting, Spinoza developed similar ideas. While Dōgen challenged the specifics of a tradition that explicitly argues against the idea of an absolute self, Spinoza faced a more radical challenge: questioning an absolute, unchanging, and free self that the Western (...) tradition has mostly taken for granted. After an analysis of the ideas of the two thinkers, the essay presents some important implications for contemporary times. Our domination of the earth and one another is arguably rooted in the individualism Dōgen and Spinoza seek to overcome. The insight that we are contextualized is a first step toward re-determining ourselves as placed within a larger whole. (shrink)

An intractable problem that characterizes the contemporary philosophical discussion of emotion is whether emotions are fundamentally cognitive or noncognitive. In this article, I will establish tha...

Spinoza’s claim that self-preservation is the foundation of virtue makes for the point of departure of this philosophical investigation into what a Spinozistic model of moral education might look like. It is argued that Spinoza’s metaphysics places constraints on moral education insofar as an educational account would be affected by Spinoza’s denial of the objectivity of moral knowledge, his denial of the existence of free will, and of moral responsibility. This article discusses these challenges in some detail, seeking to construe (...) a credible account of moral education based on the insight that self-preservation is not at odds with benevolence, but that the self-preservation of the teacher is instead conditioned by the intellectual deliberation of the students. However, it is also concluded that while benevolence retains an important place in Spinoza’s ethics, his causal determinism poses a severe threat to a convincing account of moral education insofar as moral education is commonly understood to involve an effort to influence the actions of students relative to some desirable goal. (shrink)

Conatus, the law of self-preservation, is an inherent striving of beings to persist on its own being.. Spinoza, after explaining the conatus and justifying the problem of self-destruction, rejected many of common concepts of his predecessors’ philosophical tradition and redefined them in a different way by conatus doctrine. Spinoza denied teleological interpretation of world events and offered a nonteleological explanation of them by “desire” and “appetite” that rooted in the conatus principle. Spinoza Presents special interpretation of Ethical act root and (...) lays the ethical good in the “Human will” and in the “nature of the objects”. For Spinoza, the ethics rooted in philosophical necessity, therefore, he tries to establish his own ethics on a strong foundation- that is individual egoism - which is rooted in the conatus doctrine. (shrink)