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Spinoza was one of the most influential figures of the Enlightenment, but his often obscure metaphysics makes it difficult to understand the ultimate message of his philosophy. Although he regarded freedom as the fundamental goal of his ethics and politics, his theory of freedom has not received sustained, comprehensive treatment. Spinoza holds that we attain freedom by governing ourselves according to practical principles, which express many of our deepest moral commitments. Matthew J. Kisner focuses on this theory and presents an (...) alternative picture of the ethical project driving Spinoza's philosophical system. His study of the neglected practical philosophy provides an accessible and concrete picture of what it means to live as Spinoza's ethics envisioned. (shrink)

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Thirteen original essays by leading scholars explore aspects of Spinoza's ethical theory and, in doing so, deepen our understanding of it as the richly rewarding core of his system. They resolve interpretive difficulties, advance longstanding debates, and point the direction for future research.

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While Spinoza claims that our good is both what increases our essential power and what helps us to satisfy our desires, he admits that people desire things that do not increase their power. This paper addresses this problem by arguing that Spinoza conceives of desires as expressions of our conatus , so that satisfying our desires necessarily increases our power and vice versa. This reading holds, in opposition to recent work, that Spinoza upholds a desire-satisfaction theory of the good, though (...) an unusual one, since our good is only determined by desires arising from our conatus , in other words, active desires. (shrink)

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Spinoza's Ethics is one of the most significant texts of the early modern period, important to history, philosophy, Jewish studies and religious studies. It had a major influence on Enlightenment thinkers and the development of the modern world. In Ethics, Spinoza addresses the most fundamental perennial philosophical questions concerning the nature of God, human beings and a good life. His startling answers synthesize the longstanding traditions of ancient Greek and Jewish philosophy with the developments of the emerging scientific revolution. The (...) resulting philosophical system casts out the willing, personal God of Abrahamic religions and takes up the challenge of reconceiving the natural world and human beings in an entirely secular way. This volume offers a new translation based on a new critical edition, reflecting the state of the art in Spinoza scholarship, and also includes an introduction, chronology and glossary to help make this notoriously difficult text accessible. (shrink)

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While it is often supposed that Spinoza understood a life of virtue as one of pure activity, with as few passions as possible, this paper aims to make explicit how the passions for Spinoza contribute positively to our virtue. This requires, first, explaining how a passion can increase our power, given Spinoza’s view on the passions generally, which, in turn, requires coming to terms with the problem of passive pleasure, that is, the problem of explaining how being passive can cause (...) an increase in our power. In brief, this paper will argue that, for Spinoza, even when we are passive, we are somewhat active or, in Spinoza’s language, “adequate” to varying degrees. The passions represent activity because they exercise our understanding by providing us with intelligence about external bodies and our own bodies, in particular, the degree of our bodies’ perfection. It follows that a passion can be sufficiently adequate to bring about an increase in one’s power; in this sense, they can be virtuous. Moreover, this paper will show that the passions can also be virtuous in a moral sense. The view goes roughly as follows: according to Spinoza, the passions serve as a measure of our perfection. Consequently, they play a necessary role in moral reasoning, by indicating which activities increase or hinder our virtue. On this view, a truly virtuous person would require the passions in order to engage consistently in the sorts of activities which increase her power, in particular, following reason. Since this sort of consistency in behavior is necessary for a virtuous character, the passions can be virtuous in the sense that they are necessary aspects of the sort of character which disposes us to act according to reason. (shrink)

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Spinoza’s ethical claims rest on a basic set of concepts that he regards as kinds of activity: striving, power, virtue, freedom, perfection, among others. Steven Nadler articulates a standard way of thinking about the relationship between these activity concepts: “a number of terms in Spinoza are co-extensive and refer to the same ideal human condition. We can set up the following equation for Spinoza: virtue = knowledge = activity = freedom = power = perfection. Necessarily, the more virtuous a person (...) is, the more knowledge he has, the more free, active and powerful he is, and the more he has achieved of human perfection.” This paper counters that Spinoza’s various notions of activity are not coextensive and do not refer to the same thing. In particular, Spinoza employs two basic notions of activity: striving and being an adequate cause. While these notions of activity are closely connected, they are not coextensive because a thing can strive without being an adequate cause of an effect. I defend that Spinoza’s various other activity concepts—virtue, perfection, reason and so forth—are pegged to one of these two basic notions of activity, so that Spinoza’s activity concepts are bifurcated into two categories, which are not coextensive with one another. Indeed, the members of each category may not be coextensive with one another. -/- Because these basic activity concepts play a fundamental role in Spinoza’s philosophical claims, this thesis has far-reaching implications. Most notably, the standard way of thinking mentioned above indicates that Spinoza’s basic ethical concepts, such as freedom and virtue, are coextensive with being an adequate cause. Since an adequate cause is the sole cause of some effect, this reading implies that freedom and virtue amount to being a sole cause and, thus, to being causally independent and self-sufficient. I argue, in contrast, that human freedom and virtue are coextensive with striving, which does not require causal independence. On this reading, human freedom and virtue can include instances of causal dependence, which implies that Spinoza’s ethics takes a more favorable view of human dependence, passivity and cooperation. (shrink)

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This paper is concerned with Spinoza’s treatment of a problem in early modern moral philosophy: the potential conflict between the pursuit of happiness and virtue. The problem is that people are thought to attain happiness by pursuing their self-interest, whereas virtue requires them to act with benevolence, for the benefit of others. Given the inevitability that people will have different and often competing interests, how can they be both virtuous and happy and, where the two are in conflict, which should (...) they prefer? While there were an array of treatments of the problem, most agreed on the general strategy of arguing that people’s true interests—as revealed through reason—are not in competition; rather, they coincide, such that promoting the interests of others promotes people’s own interests and vice versa. Such a response aims to show that people’s happiness is best served by being virtuous and their virtue is best served by making themselves happy.Spinoza agreed with the general outline of this solution, equating virtue with power, thereby defining virtuous behavior as the pursuit of one’s own interests. Since, for Spinoza, happiness arises from increasing one’s power, happiness and virtue are necessarily connected. Furthermore, he does not equate virtue and happiness at the expense of benevolence. This point may be overlooked since Spinoza’s single comment in the Ethics on benevolentia is denigrating: he defines benevolence as a desire arising from pity and “in a man who lives under the guidance of reason, pity in itself is useless and bad” . 1 However, we should distinguish Spinoza’s benevolentia, a kind of piteous desire, from a common notion of benevolence as acting to the benefit of others, which he defends. (shrink)

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This paper argues that Shaftesbury differs from other moral sentimentalists (Hutcheson, Hume, Smith) because he conceives of the moral sentiments as partial and first-personal, rather than impartial and spectatorial. This difference is grounded in Shaftesbury’s distinctive notion that moral self-governance consists in the self-examination of soliloquy. Breaking with his Stoic influences, Shaftesbury holds that the moral sentiments play the role of directing and guiding soliloquy. Because soliloquy is first-personal reflection that is directed to achieving happiness, claiming that the moral sentiments (...) direct soliloquy leads Shaftesbury to conceive of the moral sentiments as arising from the internal perspective of an agent focused on her own happiness. This provides Shaftesbury with a stronger framework for understanding moral sentiments, for it avoids the difficulty of explaining why the sentiments of others or those arising from an imagined spectator’s perspective are motivating or authoritative for us. (shrink)

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Spinoza’s bold, spirited defense of toleration is an animating theme of the Theological-Political Treatise (TTP) and an important reason for the significant historical impact of the text. But Spinoza’s arguments for toleration can be challenging to discern. True to its title, the TTP offers two main arguments for toleration, one political, the other theological. This paper argues that Spinoza’s theological argument for toleration is closely connected to a distinct and often overlooked argument from pluralism. This paper examines Spinoza’s argument from (...) pluralism and defends that it is more attractive to similar arguments for toleration offered by Bodin and Bayle. It is more attractive than Bodin’s pluralism argument because Spinoza’s allows that religious beliefs and doctrines of faith have a rational justification, which makes possible a more optimistic picture of the prospects for religious disputation. Spinoza’s pluralism argument is also more attractive than Bayle’s argument because Spinoza’s does not regard religious beliefs as justified by sincerity, which means that he does not need to recognize any problematic rights of erroneous conscience, nor is he forced to accept as justified sincere beliefs in persecution or obviously immoral or irreligious beliefs. (shrink)

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How are we to understand Descartes' view on the power and scope of reason? According to a common view, Descartes traffics in what I call 'theocentric rationalism.' Theocentric rationalism holds that human reason resembles divine reason, according to which God created the world. A hallmark of this view is the notion that knowledge should be analyzed and evaluated according to the standards of cognition achievable by God. ;My dissertation argues that Descartes resisted treating human reason as resembling divine reason. This (...) is supported by Descartes' theological voluntarism which denies that God is bound by the standards of human reason. Rather, Descartes conceived of reason as a natural power. He argued that reason is a power of mental substances, as much a part of the natural world as powers belonging to their counterpart, bodily substances. This conception of reason led Descartes to a view which I call "naturalistic rationalism." It holds that human knowledge is subject to the constraints and limitations imposed by our natural faculties human knowledge should be analyzed and evaluated according to the standards of cognition achievable by humans, given these limitations. According to my interpretation, Descartes did not seek to justify human reason by recourse to independent standards, such as divine reason. ;My case for this interpretation takes the form of a narrative tracing the development of Descartes' views on reason. Descartes' theory of reason emerged from his first systematic project, the method. Because Descartes held that method must employ the cognitive faculties properly, this early work, particularly the unpublished Regulae ad Directionem Ingenii , provides extensive discussions of reason, its proper function and its limits. I argue that Descartes' mature metaphysical work continued to uphold the central claims of his early theory of reason, in particular, the view that reason is a natural power, subject to natural constraints. ;This reading draws attention to the often neglected philosophical influence of Descartes' close friend, Marin Mersenne. Furthermore, my reading demonstrates the continuity of Descartes' early and later work. Most importantly, my reading allows us to better appreciate the significant differences between Descartes' rationalism and other rationalists. (shrink)

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This chapter contains sections titled: The Philosophical Background to Method Descartes' Method Descartes' Successors: Malebranche and Spinoza on Method.

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In the Ethics, Spinoza famously wrote, “we do not seek or desire anything, because we judge it to be good; on the contrary, we judge a thing to be good because we endeavor it, will it, seek it and desire it.” This passage is widely recognized as asserting some of Spinoza's most important claims about the good, but the precise meaning of the passage is unclear, as interpreters have offered a wide variety of interpretations, often without noting (or even noticing) (...) their disagreements. The central interpretive question is what the key passage has to say about the relationship between desires and judgments of the good. At stake in this question is not just how we understand Spinoza's theory of the good—and by extension, much of his ethical theory – but also how we understand the reception of the scholastic Aristotelian notion that desiring something involves perceiving or thinking it to be good, the “guise of the good thesis”. This paper offers an interpretation of the passage that emphasizes differences between Spinoza and a Hobbesian view of judging the good. Rather, I show – perhaps surprisingly – that Spinoza is closer to the scholastic-Aristotelian tradition. (shrink)

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While Spinoza’s political philosophy is often described as liberal, it is not always clear what this label means or whether it is warranted. Calling Spinoza ‘liberal’ implies that he belongs to a historical tradition of political philosophers, who formulated and defended claims, which later became identified as central to political liberalism. Consequently, clarifying how Spinoza is a liberal requires specifying precisely which liberal views he articulated and defended. This paper, first, examines the various ways that commentators have interpreted Spinoza as (...) defending liberal commitments. This examination shows that most commentators describe Spinoza as liberal on the grounds that his politics defends the value of individual political freedom, specifically of speech and thought. The paper, second, considers whether he upholds a claim that is important to contemporary liberalism, what is sometimes called the fundamental liberal principle. The paper concludes that Spinoza does not, which suggests that he does not sit as easily in the liberal tradition as some scholars have suggested. (shrink)

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