Search Results

This book comprises three main chapters on Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, with extensive responses. It explores the common ground of the great early-modern rationalist theories, and provides an examination of the ways in which the mainstream Platonic tradition permeates these theories. One chapter identifies characteristically Platonic themes in Descartes’s cosmology and metaphysics, finding them associated with two distinct, even opposed attitudes to nature and the human condition, one ancient and ‘contemplative’, the other modern and ‘controlling’. It finds the same tension in Descartes’s moral theory, and believes that it remains unresolved in present-day ethics. Was Spinoza a Neoplatonist theist, critical Cartesian, or naturalistic materialist? The second chapter argues that he was all of these. Analysis of his system reveals how Spinoza employed Neoplatonist monism against Descartes’s Platonist pluralism. Yet the terminology — like the physics — is Cartesian. And within this Platonic-Cartesian shell Spinoza developed a rigorously naturalistic metaphysics and even, Ayers claims, an effectually empiricist epistemology. The final chapter focuses on the Rationalists’ arguments for the Platonist, anti-Empiricist principle of ‘the priority of the perfect’, i.e. the principle that finite attributes are to be understood through corresponding perfections of God, rather than the reverse. It finds the given arguments unsatisfactory but stimulating, and offers a development of one of Leibniz’s for consideration. These chapters receive informed and constructive criticism and development at the hands of, respectively, Douglas Hedley, Sarah Hutton and Maria Rosa Antognazza.

This book defends a comprehensive interpretation of Spinoza's enlightened vision of human excellence, including his theories of good and evil, virtue, perfection, and freedom. Spinoza holds that what is fundamental to human morality is the fact that we find things to be good or evil, not what we take those designations to mean. When we come to understand the conditions under which we act—that is, when we come to understand the sorts of beings that we are and the ways in which we interact with things in the world—then we can recast traditional moral notions in ways that help us to attain more of what we find to be valuable. For Spinoza, we find value in greater activity. Two hazards impede the search for value. First, we need to know and acquire the means to be good. In this respect, Spinoza's theory is a great deal like Hobbes's: we strive to be active, and in order to do so we need food, security, health, and other necessary components of a decent life. There is another hazard, however, that is more subtle. On Spinoza's theory of the passions, we can misjudge our own natures and fail to understand the sorts of beings that we really are. So we can misjudge what is good and might even seek ends that are evil. Spinoza's account of human nature is thus much deeper and darker than Hobbes's: we are not well known to ourselves, and the self‐knowledge that is the foundation of virtue and freedom is elusive and fragile.

This is a study of the reasons behind Spinoza's excommunication from the Portuguese–Jewish community of Amsterdam in 1656. The central question in the book is how and why did the issue of the immortality of the soul play a role in the decision to excommunicate Spinoza. The work begins with a discussion of the nature of cherem or banning within Judaism, and in the Amsterdam community, in particular, as well as of a number of possible explanations for Spinoza's ban. It then turns to the variety of traditions in Jewish religious and philosophical thought on the post‐mortem fate of the soul and the after life. This is followed by an examination of Spinoza's own views on the eternity of the mind in the Ethics and the role that the denial of personal immortality plays in his overall philosophical and political project. Part of the book's argument is that Spinoza's views were not only an outgrowth of his own metaphysical principles, but also a culmination of an intellectualist trend in medieval Jewish rationalism (especially Maimonides and Gersonides).

This book presents and analyses the most important parts of the philosophical works of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Volume 1: the shift from Aristotelian to Cartesian physics; Descartes on matter and space, on causation, and on certainty; Descartes and Spinoza on matter and mind, and on desire; Leibniz's metaphysics (monads) and physics, his theory of animals. Volume 2: Locke on ideas, on necessity, on essences, on substance, on secondary qualities, on personal identity; Descartes on modality; Berkeley's epistemology and metaphysics; Hume on ideas, on belief, on causation, on bodies, on reason; Hume and Leibniz on personal identity.

This book presents and analyses the most important parts of the philosophical works of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Volume 1: the shift from Aristotelian to Cartesian physics; Descartes on matter and space, on causation, and on certainty; Descartes and Spinoza on matter and mind, and on desire; Leibniz's metaphysics (monads) and physics, his theory of animals. Volume 2: Locke on ideas, on necessity, on essences, on substance, on secondary qualities, on personal identity; Descartes on modality; Berkeley's epistemology and metaphysics; Hume on ideas, on belief, on causation, on bodies, on reason; Hume and Leibniz on personal identity.

Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy is an annual series, presenting a selection of the best current work in the history of early modern philosophy. It focuses on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — the extraordinary period of intellectual flourishing that begins, very roughly, with Descartes and his contemporaries and ends with Kant. It also publishes papers on thinkers or movements outside of that framework, provided they are important in illuminating early modern thought. Topics covered include Spinoza's political philosophy, Leibniz, monadic domination, Newton's ontology of omnipresence and infinate space, Hume, and Descarte.

What are the most fundamental features of the world? Do minds stand outside the natural order? Is a unified picture of mental and physical reality possible? This book provides an account of the world as a unified system incorporating both the mental and the physical. The book echoes Locke's dictum that ‘all things that exist are only particulars’, and argues that properties are powerful qualities. It also spells out the implications of this view for philosophical conceptions of causation, intentionality, consciousness, and the mind–body problem. The book emphasizes the importance of non-conscious ‘vegetative’ systems, which provide clear examples of intentionality in the form of representational use. The slide from representational use to consciousness involves a change in the material of use, but not the form of representation. The concluding chapter provides an argument for the view that an ontology of particular substances and properties leads ineluctably to monism: the bus we board with Locke takes us directly to the world of Spinoza and Einstein. Along the way, we are led to understand the nature of minds and conscious states of mind in a way that avoids both reductionism (the idea that mental is reducible to the non-mental) and dualism (the idea that mental substances or properties differ dramatically from physical substances and properties).

First published in 1957, this book is a rethinking of the German–Jewish experience. The book challenges the elegiac view of Gershom Scholem, showing us the German–Jewish legacy in literature, philosophy, and critical thought in a new light. Part One re-examines the breakthrough to modernity, tracing the moves of thinkers like Moses Mendelssohn, building on the legacies of religious figures like the Baal Shem Tov and radical philosophers such as Spinoza. This vision of modernity, the book shows, rested upon a belief that “remnants” of the radical past could provide ideas and energy for reconceiving the modern world. The book's philosophy of the remnant animates Part Two as well, where his account of the political history of the Jews in modernity and the riches of Jewish culture as recast in German–Jewish thought provide insights into Leo Baeck, Hermann Cohen, and Franz Rosenzweig, among others. Part Three analyzes the post-Auschwitz complex, and uses the Book of Job to break through that trauma. Biblical in its perspective, the book describes the innovative ways that German–Jewish writers and thinkers anticipated what we now call multiculturalism and its concern with the Other. Rather than destined to destruction, the German–Jewish experience is reconceived here as a past whose unfulfilled project remains urgent and contemporary—a dream yet to be realized in practice, and hence a task that still awaits its completion.

Pioneering biblical critic, theorist of democracy, and legendary conflater of God and nature, Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) was excommunicated by the Sephardic Jews of Amsterdam in 1656 for his “horrible heresies” and “monstrous deeds.” Yet, over the past three centuries, Spinoza's rupture with traditional Jewish beliefs and practices has elevated him to a prominent place in genealogies of Jewish modernity. This book provides a riveting look at how Spinoza went from being one of Judaism's most notorious outcasts to one of its most celebrated, if still highly controversial, cultural icons, and a powerful and protean symbol of the first modern secular Jew. Ranging from Amsterdam to Palestine and back again to Europe, the book chronicles Spinoza's posthumous odyssey from marginalized heretic to hero, the exemplar of a whole host of Jewish identities, including cosmopolitan, nationalist, reformist, and rejectionist. The book shows that in fashioning Spinoza into “the first modern Jew,” generations of Jewish intellectuals—German liberals, East European maskilim, secular Zionists, and Yiddishists—have projected their own dilemmas of identity onto him, reshaping the Amsterdam thinker in their own image. The many afterlives of Spinoza are a kind of looking glass into the struggles of Jewish writers over where to draw the boundaries of Jewishness and whether a secular Jewish identity is indeed possible. Cumulatively, these afterlives offer a kaleidoscopic view of modern Jewish culture and a vivid history of an obsession with Spinoza that continues to this day.