baruch spinoza
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Philosophies ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 6
Author(s):  
Boleslaw Z. Kabala ◽  
Thomas Cook

Most comparisons of Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza focus on the difference in understanding of natural right. We argue that Hobbes also places more weight on a rudimentary and exclusive education of the public by the state. We show that the difference is related to deeper disagreements over the prospect of Enlightenment. Hobbes is more sanguine than Spinoza about using the state to make people rational. Spinoza considers misguided an overemphasis on publicly educating everyone out of superstition—public education is important, but modes of superstition may remain and must be offset by institutions and a civil religion. The differences are confirmed by Spinoza’s interest in the philosopher who stands apart and whose flourishing may be protected, but not simply brought about, by rudimentary public education. Spinoza’s openness to a wisdom-loving elite in a democracy also sets up an interesting parallel with Thomas Jefferson’s own commitment to the natural aristocracy needed to sustain republicanism. In demonstrating the 17th century philosopher’s skepticism toward using the state exclusively to promote rationality, even as he recognizes the importance of a sovereign pedagogical role and the protection of philosophy, we move to suggest that Spinoza is relevant to contemporary debates about public education and may reinvigorate moral and political discourse in a liberal democracy.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mattie-Martha Sempert

Sweet Spots thinks transversally across language and body, and between text and tissue. This assemblage of essays collectively proposes that words—that is, language that lands as written text—are more-than-human material. And, these materials, composed of forces and flows and tendencies, are capable of generating text-flesh that grows into a thinking in the making. The practice of acupuncture—and its relational thinking—often makes its presence felt to twirl the text-tissue of the bodying essays. Ficto-critical thinking is threaded throughout to activate concepts from process philosophy and use the work of other thinkers (William James, Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, Baruch Spinoza, and Virginia Woolf, to name a few) to forge imaginative connections. Entangled in the text-tissue are an assortment of entities, such as bickering body parts, quivering jellyfish, heart pacemaker cells, a narwhal tooth, Taoist parables, always with ubiquitous, stretchy connective tissue — from gooey interstitial fluid to thick planes of fascia — ever present to ensure that the essaying bodies become, what Alfred North Whitehead calls the one-which-includes-the-many-includes-the-one. The essaying bodies orient towards the sweetest sweet spot which is found, not in the center, but slightly askew, felt in the reverbing more-than that carries their potential. Crucially, this produces a shift in perspective away from self-enclosed bodies and experts toward a care for the connective tissue of relation.


Ethnicities ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 146879682110626
Author(s):  
Marcelo Svirsky

This paper concerns Let me tell you a story about Israel, a theatrical play tasked with influencing existing perceptions of the Palestine/Israel conflict amongst international audiences. Drawing on the work of philosopher Baruch Spinoza, I explore the complex issue of how to address the need to change people’s political perceptions by using theatre as a form of activist persuasion. The play attempts to create an image of the conflict mostly absent in the commentaries of international observers who are unaware of the full implications of the conflict’s settler colonial character. Typically, they understand it in terms of two sides competing over land, frontiers and recognition. The sense of balance that this perception conveys pre-empts coming to grips with the colonial history of Palestine beginning with the advent of Zionism from late 19th century. Such a view also obscures the nature of current forms of Israeli domination and fails to take into account a major historical factor: that the settler colonial dynamic in Palestine rests on the ways social life in Israel is organised and reproduced. Hence, the play aims to make perceptible the relation between the social mechanisms of subjectivity formation in the Israeli society on the one hand, and the everyday performance of settler colonial power on the other. Making this relation observable is a necessary step towards rethinking where change could possibly come from.


Author(s):  
Michael Meng

Abstract This essay discusses several books, ancient and recent, on plagues to ask the question: Can we face death without turning away from it through historical narration? Can we write about death, which only afflicts individuals, without stripping death of its individuality? After briefly addressing these questions, I discuss five books, one from the ancient period (Thucydides’s Peloponnesian War), one from the late medieval period (Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron), one from the early modern period (Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year), and two from the modern period (Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, and Frank Snowden’s Epidemics and Society). These books not only come from different eras but also reflect different written responses to death—ancient history, story/fable, reportage, futuristic novel, and contemporary history. The essay concludes by considering a counterargument to its focus on death, an argument developed by Baruch Spinoza which claims that humans should think nothing less than of death.


2021 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 37-60
Author(s):  
Danilo Tapia
Keyword(s):  

El artículo analiza la noción de amor en la filosofía de Spinoza a través del Tratado de la reforma del entendimiento, el Tratado breve y la Ética. El amor en Spinoza debe contextualizarse en su fenomenología crítica de los afectos y su teoría del conocimiento. Así es posible mostrar que, para Spinoza, cómo se ama —activa o pasivamente— es más importante que una distinción normativa entre objetos de amor correctos o incorrectos. Esta interpretación sobre el amor en Spinoza es coherente con las premisas éticas y el monismo ontológico de su filosofía, y con su afirmación de que el amor es también una actividad de la Sustancia.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Morgan Golf-French

From the 1670s Stoic philosophy had been closely associated with atheism and the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. However, in 1771 the historian Christoph Meiners published a short essay on the concept of apatheia that revived interest in Stoic philosophy within the German lands. Over the following years, he and his colleague Dieterich Tiedemann developed a novel interpretation claiming that Stoicism closely prefigured the philosophy of John Locke and represented a source of valuable philosophical ideas. Immanuel Kant, his allies, and later Idealists such as Hegel adopted this empiricist interpretation, despite their otherwise deep philosophical disagreements with Meiners and Tiedemann. Tracing eighteenth-century German debates around Stoicism reveals how it came to be considered a form of empiricism. As well as contributing to recent scholarship on the reception of Stoicism, the article suggests a major point of intersection between currents of the Enlightenment usually only treated separately.


2021 ◽  
Vol N° 340 (10) ◽  
pp. 17-17
Author(s):  
Guillaume Fondu
Keyword(s):  

Laws ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 72
Author(s):  
Boleslaw Z. Kabala ◽  
Rainey Johnson

Debates about judicial review and departmentalism have continued to rage, and in the wake of the last three Supreme Court appointments and current Presidential Commission on the Court, only look to intensify. Should the US adopt a notwithstanding or override provision, of the kind that exits in Canada and Israel? These countries take a departmentalist approach to allow the legislature to override the Court, “notwithstanding” its ruling. Although America is a presidential framework, a paradox emerges: evidence exists that its system already makes possible the equivalent of a notwithstanding clause. This consists of Congress and the President together “overruling” the Supreme Court. In another sense, however, this is not an accepted practice—large parts of the legal community hold that the US Constitution establishes judicial supremacy. To better understand this dynamic, we consider two kinds of power: formal and authorized (potestas) as well as direct and concrete (potentia). The contrast between the positions on both power and sovereignty of Thomas Hobbes (associated with potestas) and Baruch Spinoza (linked to potentia) helps clarify these issues in a contemporary context. It turns out that a robust departmentalist equivalent of the notwithstanding clause already exists in the US, as a matter of Hobbesian potestas but not of Spinozist potentia. Another term for the latter is pouvoir constituant. Spinoza’s perspective on political activity further clarifies the in-between nature of the American override capacity: the active or passive character of a multitude is not binary, but is a matter of degree. Without making an institutional recommendation, we note that Spinoza’s understanding of power also allows for dynamic interaction between potentia and potestas: formal authorization can contribute to the expression of direct power. It is, therefore, conceivable that additional codification of the existing American override capacity, either through a joint declaration of Congress and the Presidency or a Constitutional Amendment, can strengthen the effective sovereignty of the American people in relation to the courts.


2021 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 338-356
Author(s):  
Ivan Macut
Keyword(s):  

In diesem Aufsatz werden Beiträge zur Philosophie in den Schriften einiger katholischer Priester, Philosophielehrer in Kroatien von 1945 bis 1991, erörtert. Neben Einleitung und Schluss umfasst der Hauptteil der Abhandlung folgende Kapitel: 1. Kurze Übersicht zum Ver-hältnis der kommunistischen Regierung zur Katholischen Kirche in Kroatien von 1945 bis 1991; 2. Philosophisch-Theologische Hochschulen in Kroatien und deren Zeitschriften von 1945 bis 1991 und 3. Philosophische Themen in den Publikationen von einigen katholischen Geistlichen im Zeitraum 1945 bis 1991. Da die Kommunistische Partei in der Zeit von 1945 bis 1991 in Kroatien an der Macht war, hat sie mit ihren repressiven Maßnahmen, Verfolgungen und Morden das gesamte Leben der kroatischen Gesellschaft und die Aktivitäten der Katholi-schen Kirche stark beeinflusst. Im Hinblick auf diese Tatsache werden philosophische Abhand-lungen, die einige Priester als Philosophielehrer verfasst haben, erforscht. Die philosophischen Themen, mit denen sie sich befasst haben, waren vielfältig: die Philosophie von Nikolai Berdjajew; Dialog mit Marx; Beiträge zur Kosmologie, Ontologie, Theodizee; die Philosophie von Baruch Spinoza; Grenzfragen zur Philosophie, Theologie und Naturwissenschaften. Fol-gende kirchliche Philosophielehrer werden in diesem Beitrag erfasst: Josip Kribl, Ivan Devčić, Mijo Škvorc, Tomo Vereš, Božo Milanović, Ante Kusić, Krsto Kržanić, Vjekoslav Bajsić und Rudolf Brajčić.


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