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Governors Island in New York Harbor is the place on which the jurisdictional principles of religious tolerance and freedom of conscience were delivered first in the New World with the arrival of New York's first settlers from the Dutch Republic in 1624. That jurisprudence was the underpinning of New York's unique ethos of diversity and pluralism. This article explores the complex juridical and cultural context of the meaning of the welcome extended to Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews in New Netherland in 1654/55. The latter group, mostly destitute Sephardic refugees from Dutch Brazil, sought shelter in New Amsterdam in September 1654 as a result of the fall of Brazil to the Portuguese. They were not welcomed for assorted reasons. Following a petition, the Sephardim received official residency in April 1655; ' ... they shall be allowed to sail and to trade in New Netherland and also be allowed to reside and settle there' on the basis of 'reason and equity.' Eighteen years earlier, the Sephardim in Dutch Brazil had been granted a license by the Dutch Governor-General Johan Maurits to build a synagogue at Recife in 1638. Construction was started in 1640. The edifice was consecrated in 1642. It was the first synagogue in the Western Hemisphere, prompting the question wherein the Americas started the jurisprudence of toleration first as a natural right and as the foundational principle for religious diversity? Restoring the Island's historical integrity as the birthplace of New York State and the origin of the vital ethic of Tolerance as the defender and definer of American liberty would preserve the Island's historic substance and national symbolism as a primary American and universal value for future generations. On 12 December 2015 Secretary of State John Kerry declared that 'the fundamental values of our nation were built on Tolerance.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of infinity for Spinoza's philosophy can hardly be overstated. Understanding Spinoza means understanding (Spinoza's take on) infinity. In this paper, I present a deflationary account of Spinoza's infinity: Infinities across ontological states (modes, attributes, substance) follow the same general trajectory: From an indeterminate essence, infinitely many things follow. And as a consequence, Spinoza's universe is infinite all the way down. Some think that to Spinoza, infinity is indeterminacy (acosmism). Others say that infinity in substance follows from the essence of substance, while infinity in modes does not. I argue that both views are false. Instead, infinity in modes and infinity in substance emerges from the numerical indeterminacy of essences. I show that this view can be traced back to Descartes' famous wax example and that it is manufactured to avoid a particular contradiction. In order to specify my point, I demonstrate that both ‘absolute infinity’ (God) and ‘in suo genere infinity’ (attributes) must be read through the deflationary account of infinity. I also argue that we do not need an additional qualitative indeterminacy and that causation and conception are not always parallel (such as in reductio proofs). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This response to Eileen Hunt's The First Last Man: Mary Shelley and the Postapocalyptic Imagination (2024) addresses the question of whether there is such a thing as a general apocalypse, or whether when we speak of apocalypses we are always presupposing a certain community of humans or beings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue for a novel reading of Spinoza's position in his exchange with Boyle about Boyle's experiment with nitre. Boyle claimed to have shown through experiments that nitre ceased to be nitre after heating. Spinoza disagreed and proposed the alternative hypothesis that nitre has changed its state and not its nature. Spinoza's position was construed in the literature as rational scepticism denying that experiments can yield knowledge of essences because all sensory experience is underdetermined and open to multiple interpretations. I argue for an alternative reading of Spinoza's position which focuses on Bacon's notion of crucial instance. According to this reading, Spinoza did not deny the possibility of knowing by experimentation whether nitre has changed its nature, he asked for a crucial instance, i.e. an experiment that would refute the hypothesis that nitre has changed merely its state. Spinoza's argumentative strategy shows that, contrary to the mainstream reading, the representational content of sensory ideas can be determined even if it does not represent the essence of the object: we can know with absolute, rather than merely moral, certainty whether nitre ceased to be nitre without knowing what nitre is. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper asks a key existential question: how, as existential practitioners, do we be 'in the room' with suffering? It is a question that reverberates through all time, from the story of Job through all the world's wars and, more recently, in the worldwide pandemic. Supporting nurses in a socalled 'safe' room on a COVID ward, it arose for me in a new and more urgent way. I found myself turning to the writings of the French philosopher, Simone Weil (1909-1943) who sought to understand this most perplexing and distressing question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What sense does it make to say that a new program implemented in a community with roots as old as evolution caused an observed health benefit? Evaluation of community approaches has often sought to isolate the causal roles of interventions. Central to this is the assumption that there are causes to be proven and isolated. Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677) dismissed the concept of cause, arguing that all things, "substances," are not caused but simply are. Actions of things in nature can influence each other, e.g., erosion of a mountain, but their substance, the mountains simply are. For Spinoza, satisfaction in life comes from realizing and acting in accord with our substance, but this requires communities that support such realization and action. Thus, communities and the vast influences they contain are central to human welfare. Interventions within them do not cause benefits but join with the history, culture, and numerous other features of the community in becoming part of how the community influences its members. Implications include a) expanding the social ecological model fully to embrace multiple influences – including innovative programs – and interactions among them, and c) varied research methods to identify practical lessons about how communities may adopt and incorporate innovations to engender change, rather than a catalogue of interventions that are supposed to change them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a new theoretical direction for design ethics, recognizing its significance in today's technology and philosophical debates on what constitutes goodness. Current discussions often overlook these debates, leaving designers in ethical dilemmas without principles to articulate design ethics. We argue for a philosophical and ontological approach encouraging reflections on systems and politics beyond economics. This article introduces a new schema for reimagining design ethics through four aspects, supported by theoretical insights from three key concepts in Spinoza's Ethics: multifaceted perception and ingenium, the pursuit of activity, and a relational interpretation of his ontology. This article offers significant insights into the essence of goodness, and it tackles the ethical challenges prevalent in atomized societies and structural issues, serving as a theoretical guide for design alternatives in our contemporary realities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

El propósito de este artículo es mostrar la ambigüedad que caracteriza a la definición de los afectos que Spinoza presenta al principio del libro III de su Ética en lo que respecta a la locución adverbial et simul que aparece en ella. El problema que aquí se plantea es aclarar hasta qué punto y en qué sentido Spinoza podría considerar que hay afectos del cuerpo o afectos del alma puramente. Este estudio pretende añadir argumentos, basados en las consideraciones que hace Spinoza sobre el placer y el dolor, que respalden la hipótesis de la existencia de afectos del cuerpo, pero haciendo compatible dicha tesis con el enfoque monista de Spinoza.

Before achieving success as a novelist, George Eliot spent several years translating Spinoza’s Ethics. Previous scholarship on Spinoza and Eliot has generally assumed that Eliot’s novels are wholly influenced by Spinoza, or that they can even be read as ‘translations’ of Spinoza. In this article, I instead argue that Eliot’s shift from Spinoza translation to novel-writing reflects an initial repudiation of, followed by a contention with, unresolved problems in Spinoza’s social philosophy as regards the role of sympathy, fellow-feeling, and the knowledge of others as distinct and different beings. I also explore how Eliot’s own views develop between the early novel Adam Bede and the later Middlemarch to argue against a reading of ‘sympathy’ in Eliot as something wholly consistent or uniform. Her efforts to fashion a post-Spinozan art of sympathy in Adam Bede, in which a morality of fellow-feeling is emphasised and explored in narratives of love and self-renunciation, resulted in internal problems concerning the reliability of the imagination and the power of societal relations to condition how this fellow-feeling is experienced. The later Eliot draws on a conceptual imagery of ‘threads’ of relationality and a ‘fabric’ of opinion in Middlemarch to emphasise the integration of thinking and feeling, and the role of beneficent action, in a manner consistent with aspects of Spinoza’s social philosophy. I show that Eliot here makes useful progress through and beyond lacunae in the Ethics, contributing to a wider set of debates about sympathy, difference, ethics, and epiphanies through the concept of sympathetic knowledge.

In this book, François Zourabichvili addresses three major themes of Spinoza’s philosophy, namely ethical emendation, childhood, and politics. Through the notion of transformation, the author argues that Spinozism is a “paradoxical conservatism” insofar as the Dutch philosopher develops a theory in which a transformation of the essence means death, and the main concern of this system is to create something that will be able to conserve itself. In this review, I argue that by linking together the problems of emendation, pedagogy, and political change, Zourabichvili grants a striking political relevance to both ethical emendation and pedagogy, introducing an alternative to revolutionary change without being less radical.

Following Santiago Slabodsky’s articulation of a tradition of decolonial Judaism and his suggestion that Spinoza might be considered a part of it, I argue that Spinoza may be considered a decolonial thinker. While outlining the historical context in which the Jewish Spinoza wrote, I present an interpretation of Spinoza’s philosophy—in particular, the political implications of his substance monism and naturalism—and demonstrate how it satisfies general standards for a decolonial theory. In addition to highlighting relevant topics in Spinoza’s corpus, including the notion of servitude and his passing comments on Islam, I rebut several potential objections to this reading. While accepting points of tension, I claim a generally consistent, decolonial character may define the overall system of Spinoza’s philosophy. I conclude the paper by considering the relationship between this interpretation and the only proper mention of colonialism in Spinoza’s corpus, i.e., his waking dream of a silent Afro-Brazilian man.

Does Hegel embrace pantheism? He faced accusations from his orthodox peers who adhered to Pantheism, a phrase that was commonly associated with atheism during his day. This study presents a counterargument to the assertion made by several contemporary orthodox contemporaries that Hegel is pantheistic. Hegel can be classified as a semi-pantheist. The manuscript is divided into three distinct sections. In the initial segment, I examine pantheism as posited by Spinoza, the pioneering contemporary pantheist whose contributions exerted a profound influence on other German thinkers, including Hegel. In the subsequent part, an examination of Hegel's pantheism will be conducted through an analysis of the concept of God or the Absolute. In the third section, an analysis is conducted on Hegel's notion of the features of the Absolute, and a comparison is made with Spinoza's God or Nature in order to ascertain if Hegel can be classified as a pantheist. It is believed that Hegel has a dissenting stance towards conventional pantheism, particularly that of Spinoza. Therefore, it can be inferred that Hegel's pantheism differs from Spinoza's. Hegel can be classified as a semi-pantheist.

To explore the strategic role of translation in radical Enlightenment thought and its interconnection with social revolutions, this contribution focuses on the figure of D'Holbach and the textual case of the Traité des trois imposteurs. It discusses the baron's publishing, translating and writing activities, his sources, mainly Spinoza and Boulainvilliers, and his own work built largely on those same sources. It brings publishers, translators, anonymous manuscript-writers and authors of different historical periods into the same conceptual and historical-archaeological scheme to test the thesis of ‘entangled histories of revolution'. The case of the Traité des trois imposteurs in D'Holbach's edition/translation of 1768 compared with its sources, variants and effects, can be seen as an example of strategic text fabrication and such an entanglement. In each of the translations/editions of the Traité, we encounter an appropriation of the text inspired by the current context and need for renewal. This is also the case in D'Holbach’s “own” work and in each of the other “sources,” namely Lucas (1719), Boulainvilliers (1712) and Spinoza himself. The same happens when we look to the editions/translations that follow until 1796, and especially in the Italian translation (1798) presumably effected by Bocalosi, a radical translation in every sense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Schleiermacher's Speeches. About religion. Second edition. Berlin 1806, has never been reprinted. The book is completely forgotten. But it can be seen as a new draft in which the author, who has now become a professor of theology and philosophy in Halle, reacts to the latest developments in philosophy (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel). This is done through multiple exchanges of terms and the insertion of completely revised parts. The new edition is intended to provide a philosophical clarification of the relationship between religion and philosophy. The question arises as to whether Schleiermacher merely gave a nuance or a fundamental change in his view of the nature of religion. This question can only be decided by reading the entire newly edited book. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This essay (written in response to Steven Nadler's article in this issue) seeks to interrogate the promise of Spinoza's perfectionism for education. It does so by first establishing Spinoza's perfectionism as a striving toward the intellectual love of God, occasioning an investigation of the relation Nadler sets up between Spinoza's and Maimonides' perfectionist schemes, and then evaluating the educational currency of such a striving. It is argued that while Spinoza's highest good is difficult to construe as a widely attainable educational aim, it allows for two different educational pathways, where one focuses on the reeducation of passions via narratives adjusted to the ingenia of students and the other on attaining the highest good. At a glance, these two pathways come across as radically different in their setup, but they are aligned insofar as the stability of the community (agreeability) is a precondition for the striving for intellectual perfection. In parallel, this tracks how a pedagogical relation – being necessarily asymmetrical from the outset – can evolve into a relation of mutual friendship once the striving for perfection is identified and accepted as a common goal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this response to Steven Nadler's paper, I ask whether Spinoza views the transition from rational to intuitive knowledge as an individual or a collective project and conclude that it is largely a collective one. For Spinoza, our individual capacity to reason is underwritten by a social practice, an art of reasoning, which licences the rational conclusions on which intuitive knowledge rests. Equally, the pursuit of intuitive knowledge rests on a shared art of intuiting. Both kinds of knowledge are therefore collective achievements. If this is right, acquiring intuitive knowledge presupposes a certain kind of education. While it may be in principle available to everyone, as Nadler claims, it depends in practice on educational luck. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article's question is whether Spinoza understands the highest human perfection – which he equates with both our highest good and the love of God – as a theoretical state, consisting in having knowledge and the perfection of beliefs, or as a practical state, consisting in having virtue and the perfection of action. Consequently, the article is also partly about how Spinoza understands moral education, that is, whether the education necessary for achieving the highest human perfection is fundamentally theoretical or practical in nature. The article answers this question by considering Spinoza's view of the highest good in the context of Maimonides and Crescas. The article argues that Spinoza adopts elements of both philosopher's views, including Crescas's view that the highest good must also be a practical state of virtue, which means that Spinoza must understand moral education as resulting in the perfection of action as well as knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In building his account of human blessedness in Ethics 5, Spinoza offers two closely related conceptions of the love of God: the love toward God and the intellectual love of God. While Steven Nadler maintains that these loves are different affects, I argue that these are different descriptions of the same thing: any instance of the active affect that is a love toward God is at the same time an instance of the intellectual love of God. Spinoza's views about society and its importance for education and human perfection are, I argue, nicely compatible with this account of the love of God, which suggests that all human beings possess, albeit in different degrees, the same sort of knowledge of God. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops the ideas of perfection and education in Spinoza and Maimonides. Both thinkers identify human perfection with intellectual knowledge and a transformation in affect. They accordingly envision education in terms of enhancing cognition and shaping the desire to know. The first steps are a critical evaluation of imagination and the development of the mind's rational, inferential powers. These steps stabilize and strengthen our positive affects, and they arouse a desire for what Spinoza calls the third kind of knowing and Maimonides calls intellectual apprehension. Individuals achieve this highest perfection by degrees, if at all. Spinoza argues that the more the body can undergo, the more we know, the more active and hence the more perfect we are, and the more joy, love, and satisfaction we experience. Spinoza calls the third kind of knowing both scientia intuitiva and amor dei intellectualis. Maimonides's perfect human being experiences an intellectual apprehension of the existence of God and receives flashes of insight concerning aporetic metaphysical questions. Although Spinoza's amor dei intellectualis transforms the knower's way of living, it is not explicitly political. Maimonides' model of the perfect human is Moses, whose intellectual apprehension brings about a passionate love for God and eventuates in prophecy, which Maimonides theorizes as the overflow of intellectual attainment through imagination. Moses is the most perfect prophet, the one who founds and organizes a community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the symposium on Spinoza on perfectionism and education. It frames the key issue of Spinoza's perfectionism in terms of a perennial educational problem and introduces the different contributions to this special issue, where Steven Nadler's main paper is followed by a series of full paper responses by a group of Spinoza scholars and educational theorists. To round off the special issue, Nadler comments on the responses to his main paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Part Five of Spinoza's Ethics includes a notoriously challenging set of propositions about human perfection. Part of the difficulty in interpreting these elements of the work arises from neglecting important philosophical background for the relevant propositions, namely, medieval Jewish rationalism and Maimonides in particular. Spinoza was well acquainted with Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexted as well as his halakhic or legal writings. For both Spinoza and Maimonides (who, in turn, is a good Aristotelian on this matter), human perfection is essentially a cognitive matter, albeit one with an affective component, whereby the highest good for a human being consists in the superb and joyful intellectual condition that is the knowledge and love of God. My goal in this essay, then, is to see whether any light can be thrown on Spinoza's views on this topic by considering them through a Maimonidean lens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista SAAP is the property of Sociedad Argentina de Analisis Politico and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

We argue that the proper context for understanding Collingwood's The Principles of Art is his claim that it has bearing "upon the condition of art in England in 1937". We thus argue that he formulated a philosophical argument that underpins avant-garde dramatic poetry and theatrical practices (Eliot, Auden and the Group Theatre), taking his interpretation of Spinoza's Ethics 5 prop. 3 to be the book's central thesis: it is through art that one knows, against the 'corruption of consciousness', what emotions one feels and recognizes them as one's own. Collingwood further believed that this could only be achieved through collaboration between the artist and the community, validating new theatrical practices involving interaction with the audience. We analyse these views in the context of England in 1937: in an era marked by the rise of Fascism and Nazism, Collingwood believed that art thus conceived could help restoring emotional support for the defense of liberal democracies. We conclude with an exploration of parallels with and divergences from the Spinozist idea of 'mobilizing affects' in contemporary 'left populism' (Mouffe). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

En este artículo nos proponemos mostrar como el sistema político creado por el neoliberalismo es incapaz de procurar las condiciones adecuadas para que los seres humanos puedan alcanzar la felicidad. Para hacer esto, se realizará una interpretación de la filosofía de Baruch Spinoza que muestre que para que los seres humanos puedan alcanzar la felicidad, primero, deben de ser libres y esta libertad solo se puede conseguir mediante la unión social en comunidades políticas sanas donde prime la ayuda mutua. Al destruir la unión social, fruto de su propio planteamiento antropológico, el neoliberalismo priva a los individuos de la necesaria libertad que necesitan para poder ser felices y como consecuencia el neoliberalismo, nunca ha estado en condiciones de asegurar que las gentes puedan ser, efectivamente, felices.

Panentheism and pantheism represent one of the most profound, even startling parallels across the world’s great metaphysical traditions about which the present article seeks to explore and carry out a comparative study of certain Eastern and Western philosophers with special reference to the views of two chief exponents of Advaita Vedanta of Indian philosophy, Shankara and Ramanuja. Both these terms, touch on the relation of God and the universe with the difference that the former seems to be rigid, motionless, and abstract and lacks a kind of religious fervor in its approach, while the latter is presumed to be concrete and palpable and seeks to reconcile philosophical thinking with the demands of religious feelings as well. God in pantheism is compared to the God of Spinoza, the Neutrum of Schelling, and Shankara's concept of indeterminate Brahman. In contrast, in the West Hegelian Absolute, and Ramanuja's qualified Brahman in Indian tradition, both are accredited with panentheism in which a personal God, identity-in-and-through-difference, has all auspicious qualities. Though these philosophers are from totally different temperaments and cultures, their philosophical method has certain similarities that have been examined in this work.

This paper shows that Spinoza went through a drastic change in his view on divine teleology, and that this change is worth paying attention to. In the Short Treatise (KV), Spinoza endorsed a version of divine teleology. As is widely recognized, however, he explicitly rejects divine teleology in the Ethics. I argue that this marks a significant change in his view. To illustrate the significance, I argue that Spinoza consistently maintains the following two premises in both the KV and the Ethics: (1) human beings act on account of some end; (2) human actions are actions of God. While the endorsement of divine teleology is consistent with these two, the rejection of divine teleology results in a trilemma. The trilemma, to be sure, can be resolved by introducing referential opacity to divine action contexts. I argue, however, that it is worth asking why Spinoza revised his view in this way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the 17th century philosophers, in general, was to show that, by taking as an example the success of the human mind embodied in science, definitive knowledge could be achieved in philosophy, just as in science. To this end, firstly, they described in detail the method to be followed in order to obtain the knowledge. In science, the efforts of scientists such as Kepler, Galileo, and Newton to explain the universe based on mathematics led mathematics to stand out as a way of thinking. In this period, while mathematical research methods enabled the examination of physical phenomena, philosophy, on the other hand, was seen as a model to reach exact knowledge. Rationalist philosophers such as Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz all agree that people should use their own minds, not authorities, and moving from this idea, mathematics is the method that will lead us to the truth. This paper aims to show how these three great philosophers applied mathematics to their own philosophies, based on their differences and similarities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The celebrated Russian philosopher, Evald Ilyenkov, draws on Spinoza to solve a key philosophical problem: how exactly does the mind connect to the real world? However, the proposed solution has come under much criticism, for example in a recent special issue of Studies of East European Thought (74, 3). This paper aims to clearly explain the solution, overcoming misunderstandings that are evident in the special issue. The kernel of the solution is an argument that human cognition rests on practical activity. In practical activity humans do not act on a fixed structure within their own bodies, in the manner, say, that the activity of water is determined by its fixed structure, H2O. Instead, human practical activity directly connects with and continually adapts to the structures and causal powers of external bodies. Awareness of practical activity thereby gives the human mind access to a mode of activity that is in direct contact and ever-greater accordance with the objects of the real world. The paper will elaborate and develop this kernel, with particular attention to the notion of 'causal powers' that it contains, by drawing from the revival in philosophy and the social sciences of what has been termed 'causal powers realism'. The paper thereby opens new insights and connections regarding the Spinoza-Ilyenkov solution, alleviating the potential for misunderstandings evident in the special issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of Voltaire's belief in (or lack of belief in) God is a vexed one. René Pomeau's classic study of 1956 argued that Voltaire believed in a God who would punish and reward in the next life. More recently Gerhardt Stenger has shown that, at least after 1764, Voltaire adopted a moderated form of Spinozism. He consistently rejected a materialist atheism on the grounds that the universe showed evidence of intelligent design, and appealed to Spinoza against d'Holbach. This article studies the evolution of Voltaire's philosophical account of the deity, showing that he moved from a belief in a Newtonian creator God to a Spinozist monopsychism at least by 1756. But, under the influence of Warburton, he had come to reject Bayle's concept of a society of atheists, and consequently held that the wider public must be encouraged to believe in a providential God, a view he pretended to hold himself. Reading Voltaire after 1756 it is thus essential to understand that he held a double truth theory, so that it is sometimes necessary to 'read between the lines' to discover his meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Filozofski Vestnik is the property of Scientific Research Centre of Slovenian Academy of Sciences & Arts and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Panentheism and pantheism represent one of the most profound, even startling parallels across the world's great metaphysical traditions about which the present article seeks to explore and carry out a comparative study of certain Eastern and Western philosophers with special reference to the views of two chief exponents of Advaita Vedanta of Indian philosophy, Shankara and Ramanuja. Both these terms, touch on the relation of God and the universe with the difference that the former seems to be rigid, motionless, and abstract and lacks a kind of religious fervor in its approach, while the latter is presumed to be concrete and palpable and seeks to reconcile philosophical thinking with the demands of religious feelings as well. God in pantheism is compared to the God of Spinoza, the Neutrum of Schelling, and Shankara's concept of indeterminate Brahman. In contrast, in the West Hegelian Absolute, and Ramanuja's qualified Brahman in Indian tradition, both are accredited with panentheism in which a personal God, identity-in-and-through-difference, has all auspicious qualities. Though these philosophers are from totally different temperaments and cultures, their philosophical method has certain similarities that have been examined in this work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does Hegel embrace pantheism? He faced accusations from his orthodox peers who adhered to Pantheism, a phrase that was commonly associated with atheism during his day. This study presents a counterargument to the assertion made by several contemporary orthodox contemporaries that Hegel is pantheistic. Hegel can be classified as a semi-pantheist. The manuscript is divided into three distinct sections. In the initial segment, I examine pantheism as posited by Spinoza, the pioneering contemporary pantheist whose contributions exerted a profound influence on other German thinkers, including Hegel. In the subsequent part, an examination of Hegel's pantheism will be conducted through an analysis of the concept of God or the Absolute. In the third section, an analysis is conducted on Hegel's notion of the features of the Absolute, and a comparison is made with Spinoza's God or Nature in order to ascertain if Hegel can be classified as a pantheist. It is believed that Hegel has a dissenting stance towards conventional pantheism, particularly that of Spinoza. Therefore, it can be inferred that Hegel's pantheism differs from Spinoza's. Hegel can be classified as a semi-pantheist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I defend Spinoza's claim that extension is an attribute that an indivisible substance, such as God, could have. However, in order to explain why, we must abandon two long held orthodoxies in Spinoza scholarship. First, Spinoza acknowledges only parts that do not depend on their whole. Second, God, considered as natura naturans, has no parts of any kind. Against these orthodoxies, I show that having parts which depend on their whole, for Spinoza, does not entail divisibility and that God, considered as natuara naturans, must have such parts in order to be extended. Along the way, we will have a closer look at Spinoza’s mereology and address apparently conflicting statements that Spinoza makes about the relation of part and whole that have long vexed commentators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the influence of Spinoza's thought on the work of Antonio Negri, with a genealogical focus on his militant and theoretical development from the 1960s to the publication of Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth along with Michael Hardt. The first part of the study addresses the historical context of the Spinozist revival in France and Italy, highlighting its philosophical and political relevance, as well as Negri's insertion into this intellectual scenario. The second part analyzes the evolution of his ideas, from his militancy in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s, through his encounter with Spinoza's work, to the incorporation of concepts such as democracy and multitude in his theoretical production. Finally, the articulation of these ideas in his collaboration with Hardt is explored, where a critique of the Empire is proposed and a democratic alternative is suggested, based on the constitutive power of the multitude and the common. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work aims to depart from conventional interpretations of Spinoza’s notions of essence and existence by offering an alternative perspective called the onto-gnoseological reading. Typically, these concepts of essence and existence are approached from an ontological standpoint or are simply disregarded. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate that Spinoza, within his corpus associates these notions with the activity of the genres of knowledge rather than with the ontological realm. This reinterpretation of the concepts from a gnoseological standpoint allows for a deeper comprehension of Spinoza’s philosophical undertaking. It becomes evident that this project involves the coexistence of gnoseological duality in perfect harmony with the univocity of reality, serving as a crucial instrument for recognizing the boundaries and possibilities of human knowledge and, subsequently, the potential for achieving human virtue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author take cues from Gilles Deleuze's later works, specifically What Is Philosophy?, reading his and Félix Guattari's concept of infinite speed through a Spinozist lens. The argument is twofold. First, the author demonstrates that the concept of infinite speed serves as an indispensable condition of possibility for Deleuzian epistemology as a whole. He does so by situating the function of infinite speed in Deleuze's work alongside the function of eternity in Spinoza's work, arguing that the former picks up where the latter leaves off—that is, by serving as an epistemological ground. Thus, second, the author argues that despite Deleuze's critique of and departure from key aspects of Spinozist thought—namely, the category of eternity and desirability of substance metaphysics—the notion of infinite speed, alongside other terms, allows one to read Deleuzian philosophy as a continuation of, rather than a significant departure from, Spinozist thought. Thus, by demonstrating the precise role that infinite speed plays in Deleuze's later work, the author both illuminates the metaphysical axiom that grounds Deleuzian epistemology and, via this illumination, shows how that epistemology is consistent with and adherent to specific Spinozist philosophical commitments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article aims to investigate the gradual evolution of the notion of love between the Middle Ages and the modern age. Starting from Dante's conception and going all the way to Simmel's thought, the article shows how gradually the notion of love becomes more and more impersonal. Passing through Cusanus, Bruno and Spinoza, we can arrive at the Hegelian concept of Wechsel-wirkung, later inherited by Simmel in the Philosophy of Money, where this general constraint is understood precisely as absolutely impersonal. Regarding this progressive immanentization, it is perhaps possible to detect in Kierkegaard's thought a kind of countermovement, which highlights the problem of personality in the relationship between creator and creature.. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I (re)think An Essay on Man with respect to the history of philosophy, by reading Pope's poem comparatively with Spinoza's Ethics , a method suggested by Jean-Pierre de Crousaz's contemporary critiques of the Essay , which accused Pope of Spinozism. I also consider the Essay in the light of Fredric Jameson's assertion that there exist perennial problems that "philosophy," "theory," indeed "thinking" itself cannot solve, but which must continue to be posed anyway, not set aside or abandoned. I thus suggest a new approach to the Essay , focused on several such problems, which have often vexed previous criticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Revista Conatus: Filosofia de Spinoza is the property of Revista Conatus: Filosofia de Spinoza and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista Conatus: Filosofia de Spinoza is the property of Revista Conatus: Filosofia de Spinoza and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista Conatus: Filosofia de Spinoza is the property of Revista Conatus: Filosofia de Spinoza and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)