Since their publication in 1982, Samuel Shirley's translations of Spinoza's _Ethics_ and _Selected Letters_ have been commended for their accuracy and readability. Now with the addition of his new translation of _Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect_ this enlarged edition will be even more useful to students of Spinoza's thought.

I argue that we can arrive at a better understanding of the Ethics and why Spinoza wrote it by viewing it through certain ideas expressed in his Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect. These ideas are: 1) personal remarks, 2) the method and most perfect method, 3) true ideas, 4) false ideas, 5) definitions.

Ex nihilo nihil fit. Philosophy, especially great philosophy, does not appear out of the blue. In the current volume, a team of top scholars-both up-and-coming and established-attempts to trace the philosophical development of one of the greatest philosophers of all time. Featuring twenty new essays and an introduction, it is the first attempt of its kind in English and its appearance coincides with the recent surge of interest in Spinoza in Anglo-American philosophy.Spinoza's fame-or notoriety-is due primarily to his posthumously published (...) magnum opus, the Ethics, and, to a lesser extent, to the 1670 Theological-Political Treatise. Few readers take the time to study his early works carefully. If they do, they are likely to encounter some surprising claims, which often diverge from, or even utterly contradict, the doctrines of the Ethics. Consider just a few of these assertions: that God acts from absolute freedom of will, that God is a whole, that there are no modes in God, that extension is divisible and hence cannot be an attribute of God, and that the intellectual and corporeal substances are modes in relation to God. Yet, though these claims reveal some tension between the early works and the Ethics, there is also a clear continuity between them.Spinoza wrote the Ethics over a long period of time, which spanned most of his philosophical career. The dates of the early drafts of the Ethics seem to overlap with the assumed dates of the composition of the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect and the Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well Being and precede the publication of Spinoza's 1663 book on Descartes' Principles of Philosophy. For this reason, a study of Spinoza's early works can illuminate the nature of the problems Spinoza addresses in the Ethics, insofar as the views expressed in the early works help us reconstruct the development and genealogy of the Ethics. Indeed, if we keep in mind the common dictum. (shrink)

Practices of the self are prominent in Spinoza, both in the Ethics and On the Emendation of the Intellect. The same can be said of Descartes, e.g., his Discourse on the Method. What, if anything, distinguishes their practices of the self? Michel Foucault’s concept of “spirituality” isolates how Spinoza ’s practices are relatively unusual in the early modern era. Spirituality, as defined by Foucault in The Hermeneutics of the Subject, requires changes in the ethical subject before one can (...) begin philosophizing, and claims to result in a complete transfiguration or perfection of the subject. Both these characteristics are present in Spinoza ’s Emendation while both are lacking in Descartes’ Discourse. Turning to the Ethics’ practices of the self, I show how affects can be moderated through other affects, and that this text establishes a thorough training of the self which will strengthen one’s overall power well into the future. My treatment of the Ethics differs in emphasis from many other readings which focus on reason’s power over affects, or on cognitive therapy which moderates individual affects to lessen current sadness. In both works, Spinoza ’s practices of the self promise significant changes to those who undergo them. (shrink)

The Collected Works of Spinoza provides, for the first time in English, a truly satisfactory edition of all of Spinoza's writings, with accurate and readable translations, based on the best critical editions of the original-language texts, done by a scholar who has published extensively on the philosopher's work. This first volume contains Spinoza's single most important work, the Ethics, and four earlier works: the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, the Short Treatise on God, Man, and His (...) Well-Being, Descartes' "Principles of Philosophy," and Metaphysical Thoughts. Also included are Spinoza's letters from the periods when these works were being written. The elaborate editorial apparatus—including prefaces, notes, glossary, and indexes—assists the reader in understanding one of the world's most fascinating, but also most difficult, philosophers. Of particular interest is the glossary-index, which provides extensive commentary on Spinoza's technical vocabulary. A milestone of scholarship more than forty-five years in the making, The Collected Works of Spinoza is an essential edition for anyone with a serious interest in Spinoza or the history of philosophy. (shrink)

Spinoza’s claims about true ideas are central to the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect. It is therefore worth trying to reconstruct what he means when he says that an idea is true. I argue that the three leading interpretations – correspondence, coherence, and causal – don’t explain key passages. I then propose a new interpretation. Roughly, I propose that an idea is true if and only if it represents an essence and was derived in the right (...) kind of way by the intellect from an innate idea of one’s own essence. In the final section I sketch why I believe this interpretation extends to his claims about truth and adequacy in the Ethics. (shrink)

The young Spinoza and the mature Leibniz both characterize the soul as a self-moving spiritual automaton. Though it is unclear if Leibniz’s use of the term was suggested to him from his reading of Spinoza, Leibniz was aware of its presence in Spinoza’s Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect. Considering Leibniz’s staunch opposition to Spinozism, the question arises as to why he was willing to adopt this term. I propose an answer to this question by comparing the (...) spiritual automaton in both philosophers. For Spinoza, the soul acts as a spiritual automaton when it overcomes imaginative ideas and produces true ideas. For Leibniz, the soul acts as a spiritual automaton when it spontaneously produces its perceptions according to the universal harmony preestablished by God. Thus, for Leibniz contra Spinoza, the spiritual automaton is a means to render intelligible a providential order in which everything happens for the best. (shrink)

This anthology of the work of Baruch de Spinoza (1632-1677) presents the text of Spinoza's masterwork, the Ethics, in what is now the standard translation by Edwin Curley. Also included are selections from other works by Spinoza, chosen by Curley to make the Ethics easier to understand, and a substantial introduction that gives an overview of Spinoza's life and the main themes of his philosophy. Perfect for course use, the Spinoza Reader is a practical tool with which to approach one (...) of the world's greatest but most difficult thinkers, a passionate seeker of the truth who has been viewed by some as an atheist and by others as a religious mystic. The anthology begins with the opening section of the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, which has always moved readers by its description of the young Spinoza's spiritual quest, his dissatisfaction with the things people ordinarily strive for--wealth, honor, and sensual pleasure--and his hope that the pursuit of knowledge would lead him to discover the true good. The emphasis throughout these selections is on metaphysical, epistemological, and religious issues: the existence and nature of God, his relation to the world, the nature of the human mind and its relation to the body, and the theory of demonstration, axioms, and definitions. For each of these topics, the editor supplements the rigorous discussions in the Ethics with informal treatments from Spinoza's other works. (shrink)

It is argued, first, that although Spinoza's early Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect does show evidence of a foundationalist approach to the justification of knowledge, there are good reasons to think he came to find such an approach unsatisfactory; and second, that the Ethics notion of certainty as adequate knowledge of one's knowledge is a justificational concept which is holistic in that any instance of such certainty depends on knowledge of the entire basic metaphysical system. Finally (...) it is shown that Spinoza's having come to hold a nonlinear view regarding the justificational structure of knowledge explains why he chose to present his philosophy in the geometric form, and why he never succeeded in formulating a method of discovery. (shrink)

Chapter 5 addresses the provisional morality of the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (TIE). The young Spinoza proposes that even as one works at emending the intellect, one should live by certain rules, which one must assume to be good. One should accommodate ordinary ways of speaking and living to the extent that one can without compromising one’s project. One should enjoy pleasures in moderation. Finally, one should seek instrumental goods only insofar as they are (...) necessary for health and social acceptability. In order to explain shifts in Spinoza’s views about the way that individuals should live while pursuing the good, the chapter traces developments in his accounts of ideas and of the relationship between the philosopher and society. (shrink)

At the opening of Spinoza’s Ethics, we find the three celebrated definitions of substance, attribute, and God: E1d3: By substance I understand what is in itself and is conceived through itself, i.e., that whose concept does not require the concept of another thing, from which it must be formed [Per substantiam intelligo id quod in se est et per se concipitur; hoc est id cujus conceptus non indiget conceptu alterius rei, a quo formari debeat]. E1d4: By attribute I understand what (...) the intellect perceives of a substance, as constituting its essence [Per attributum intelligo id, quod intellectus de substantia percipit, tanquam ejusdem essentiam constituens]. E1d6: By God I understand a being absolutely infinite, that is, a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes, of which each one expresses an eternal and infinite essence We are accustomed to think of these paramount definitions as a fixed and settled formulation of the core of Spinoza’s metaphysics, but if we look at the development of Spinoza’s thought, the picture we get is quite different. In the early drafts of the Ethics and in his early works, Spinoza seems to have experimented with various conceptualizations of the relations between substance, attribute, and God. Some of Spinoza’s works make barely any use of the notions of substance and attribute, and the testimony of Spinoza’s letters suggests that, at a certain stage in his philosophical development, the concept of attribute may have been put on the back burner, if not completely dropped. Indeed, another closely related concept—accident [accidens]—was fated to be pulled out of the system (and for good reasons ). The final version of the Ethics makes hardly any use of this notion, but Spinoza’s letters show that in early drafts of the Ethics he used the term ‘accident’ to refer to what cannot be or be conceived without substance. In this paper I will attempt to provide a brief outline of the genealogy of Spinoza’s key metaphysical concepts. This genealogy, like any other, can help us to reexamine and reconsider what seems to us natural, stable and obvious. In the first part of the paper, I rely on Spinoza’s letters to trace the development of his definitions of substance and attribute in the early drafts of the Ethics. The letters, whose dates are more or less established, also provide a temporal grid for our subsequent discussions. The second part surveys Spinoza’s discussion and conceptualization of substance and attributes in the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, the Theological-Political Treatise (1670), and briefly, Spinoza’s 1663 book on Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy, and its appendix on Metaphysical Thoughts, the Cogitata Metaphysica. The third part of the paper is dedicated to Spinoza’s understanding of substance and attribute in the Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being. I conclude with some remarks on the stability of Spinoza’s final position on the issue, as expressed in the published version of the Ethics . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Mind's Eternity in Spinoza's EthicsSteven ParchmentIn the Emendation of the Intellect, Spinoza describes how he abandoned mundane pursuits of money, fame, and sensuality for the pleasures of philosophy and, by doing so, traded in merely temporary goods for a joy which is eternal (TdIE, G II/1-II/7).1 Given this motivating quest for eternal happiness, it is ironic that the section of the Ethics most frequently condemned by (...) critics as a hopeless muddle is just that section in which Spinoza attempts to demonstrate the possibility of the mind's eternal salvation. From the perspective of these critics, Spinoza has carefully constructed a deductive system of metaphysics, featuring a variety of intriguing theories such as the parallelism of mind and body, only to sully his achievement by tacking on a contradictory finale. In a vain effort to salvage immortality,2 Spinoza has placed himself in the embarrassing position of espousing both the mind's eternity and the body's limited duration, all the while maintaining that mind and body are one and the same thing. In the face of this and other seemingly blatant contradictions, some commentators have given up trying to make sense of Spinoza's remarks on the mind's eternity, preferring instead to speculate on how such a profound thinker could be led to such write such rubbish. Was it due to an overwhelming fear of death? Or perhaps a desperate leap into mysticism?3 [End Page 349]Other interpreters, of course, have been more charitable and have regarded this section of the Ethics as its rightful culmination. But the diversity of their interpretations belies, if not the inconsistency of Spinoza's position, at least the difficulty of understanding how, and in what sense, Spinoza's metaphysics can support a belief in the mind's eternity. In this paper, I examine four common answers to this question and, finding each interpretation inadequate in some way, venture a fifth. The first two sections of the paper outline and criticize the four interpretations. The last three develop an alternative reading of the mind's eternityæone, it is claimed, that is consistent with Spinoza's metaphysics.1. Interpretations of the Mind's EternityOne pivotal point by which various interpretations can be classified is how they account for the mind's eternity in relation to parallelism. The mind is the idea of the body (IIP13). Since an idea and its ideatum are "one and the same thing" (IIP7S), the mind and the body are one and the same thing, conceived under different attributes (IIP21S). But how then can Spinoza maintain that the mind is eternal, despite the destruction of the body (VP23)? One answer is that Spinoza is not literally referring to an eternal state of being; instead, he is metaphorically describing a state of knowing that is acquired in this life whenever the mind grasps sub specie aeternitatis truths about itself and its body. Thus, the eternity of the mind is compatible with parallelism, for its "eternal" life lasts no longer than the temporally limited life of the body. This view is called the epistemological interpretation. In contrast, the ontological interpretation is the view that, for Spinoza, the mind is literally eternal. Clearly, the onus falls upon advocates of the ontological interpretation to explain why the mind's eternal existence does not contradict parallelism. Generally, three types of explanations have been advanced. 1)The Episodic Ideatum Theory: Faced with the dilemma between parallelism and the mind's eternal existence, this theory qualifies the former. The mind is the idea of the body only for as long as the body endures; afterwards, the mind possesses an independent existence. 2)The Incremental Ideatum Theory: This theory maintains that the mind is the idea of a particular body only at the beginning of its existence. By reason and intuition, the mind expands its ideatum to such a point that it no longer reflects merely one finite body but rather the whole material universe. By doing so, it becomes united with God. 3)The Double Existence Theory: On this theory, the mind has an eternal existence, because the human body itself is, in some sense, eternal... (shrink)

I examine the (mediated) correspondence between Spinoza and Robert Boyle concerning the latter’s account of fluidity and his experiments on reconstitution of niter in the light of the epistemology and doctrine of method contained in the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect. I argue that both the Treatise and the correspondence reveal that for Spinoza, the proper method of science is not experimental, and that he accepted a powerful under-determination thesis. I argue that, in contrast to modern (...) versions, Spinoza’s form of naturalism was a highly rationalist and anti-empirical one. I conclude with a brief account of the value of experience and experimentation for Spinoza’s scientific method. (shrink)

Poe’s influence on the Symbolists has been traced on many occasions, though not in detail. The classical study in English is Eliot’s “From Poe to Valéry,” a Library of Congress lecture delivered three years after Valéry’s death.2 Eliot defines Poe as irresponsible and immature—irresponsible in style, immature in vision. He had, Eliot comments, “the intellect of a highly gifted young person before puberty”; “all of his ideas seem to be entertained rather than believed” . How, then, we ask, did (...) he hoax the sophisticated French? Although Eliot raises the issue of their relative ignorance of English, he prudently does not make much of it: after all, we know that Baudelaire spent seventeen years on the tales, Mallarmé still longer on the poems—thirty years for the definitive text; while Valéry, to whom Baudelaire and Mallarmé left little to translate, managed a version of the Marginalia. Each might have said, as Mallarmé did in 1885, that he had learned English for one sole reason: “to read Poe better.”3 In the matter of linguistic competence, then, Eliot is content to remark that the French poets “were not disturbed by weaknesses of which we are very much aware” . He underlines, however, that Poe showed different facets of himself to each of his readers who adopted him in various ways: Baudelaire focused on the Poète maudit, Mallarmé on the prosodist, and Valéry on the theoretician in whom he discovered “a method and an occupation—that of observing himself write” . So Poe had a diverse effect, which Eliot accepts more readily in respect of Baudelaire and Mallarmé than he does of Valéry. To explain this last case which intrigues him especially, he introduces a paradox: “with Poe and Valéry, extremes meet,” he writes, “the immature mind playing with ideas because it had not developed to the point of convictions, and the very adult mind playing with ideas because it was too skeptical to hold convictions” .Thus Eliot damns Poe with faint praise. The distance between cause and effect, master and disciples is so vast that it can only be thought the product of monstrous error. And yet “from Poet to Valéry” and the complementary studies in English or French of the past thirty-five years neglect some deeper factors that drew the Symbolists. Misreadings there were no doubt since such are in the nature of things, but these authors were sensitive to currents that others overlooked. They attempted to go to first principles, not only because Poe was “ce poète incomparable, ce philosophe non refute” 4 and, therefore, worthy of scrutiny, but because they held him to be vital to their future thought. In a period of great social and aesthetic change they found a figure of radical independence—classicist, visionary, logician supreme—whom they explained by convergent tropes of daemonic power. In this regard the newly published correspondence of Mallarmé and the massive Valéry notebooks have added to our knowledge. I would like, then, to consider the nature of Poe’s action, this submerged dialogue in time and successive rewriting by which—“à l’égal de nos maître les plus chers ou vénérés,” as Mallarmé put it5—he entered the mainstream of French poetry. 2. The lecture was later published in Hudson Review 2 : 335; all further references to this work, abbreviated “FPV,” will be included in the text.3. Mallarmé, “Autobiographie,” Oeuvres completes, p. 662.4. Baudelaire, “Le Poème du hachisch,” Oeuvres complètes, 1:427.5. Mallarmé, “Scolies,” Oeuvres completes, p. 223. James Lawler, Edward arson Waller Distinguished Service Professor of French at the University of Chicago, has written extensively on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French poetry. Among his books are Lecture de Valéry, The Language of French Symbolism, The Poet as Analyst, and René Char: The Myth and the Poem. He is currently completing a study of Buadelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal. (shrink)

This paper aims at reconstructing the ethical issues raised by Spinoza's earlyTreatise on the Emendation of the Intellect. Specifically, I argue that Spinoza takes issue with Descartes’ epistemology in order to support a form of “ethical intellectualism” in which knowledge is envisaged as both necessary and sufficient to reach the supreme good. First, I reconstruct how Descartes exploits the distinction between truth and certainty in hisDiscourse on the Method. On the one hand, this distinction acts as the basis (...) for Descartes’ epistemological rules while, on the other hand, it implies a “morale par provision” in which adequate knowledge is not strictly necessary to practice virtue. Second, I show that Spinoza rejects the distinction between truth and certainty and thus the methodological doubt. This move leads Spinoza to substitute the Cartesian Cogito with the idea of God as the only adequate standard of knowledge, through which the mind can attain the rules to reach the supreme good. Third, I demonstrate that in theShort TreatiseSpinoza develops this view by equating intellect and will and thus maintaining that only adequate knowledge can help to contrast affects. However, I also insist that Spinoza's early epistemology is unable to explain why human beings drop conceive of the idea of God inadequately. Thus, I suggest that in his later writings Spinoza accounts for the insufficiency of adequate knowledge in opposing the power of the imagination and passions by reconnecting the nature of ideas with the mind's conatus. (shrink)

Kai Nielsen is one of Canada's most distinguished political philosophers. In a career spanning over 40 years, he has published more than 400 papers in political philosophy, ethics, meta-philosophy, and philosophy of religion. Pessimism of the Intellect presents a thoughtful collection of Nielsen's essays complemented by an extended reflective interview with Nielsen. This collection allows the reader to grasp the systematic scope of his thought and methodology.

Polemics are a sort of critique typically suffused with inimical emotions and passions. But how are these emotions and passions to be construed? Neither authorial expression nor actual arousal properly account for their rôle in polemics. Rather, the polemicist must stage an unequal battle between a polemical self and the polemical target vis-à-vis an anticipated audience, skilfully handling, through his words, the emotions ascribed to each of them.

I am not going to solve in this paper the plethora of problems and riddles surrounding Spinoza’s scientia intuitiva, but I do hope to break some new ground and help make this key doctrine more readily understandable. I will proceed in the following order (keep in mind the word ‘proceed’). I will first provide a close preliminary analysis of the content and development of Spinoza’s discussion of scientia intuitiva in the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect and (...) the Ethics. In the second part, I will address two closely related questions which have drawn the attention of many readers: (i) Is scientia intuitiva a cognition that is inferential? and (ii) Is scientia intuitiva a kind of cognition that is closely tied to causation? To the surprise of many, I will argue that Spinoza’s intuitive knowledge is both inferential and causal (in a certain rigid sense of ‘inferential’ and ‘causal’ to be explained below). In the third and final part, I will explain Spinoza’s preference for scientia intuitiva and his frequent use of mathematical examples, and then attempt to map the major remaining questions and problems surrounding the doctrine. (shrink)

I argue that Descartes's best known argument for dualism relies on claims about intellectual activity and not on claims about mental states generally to establish dualism. I explain that this must be so give his historical context, where arguments for the immateriality of the mind on the basis of the intellect were common. But sensation and other non-intellectual states were regarded as pertaining to the body-soul composite.

ποιετ Heyler ' e libris suis scripsit pro S0009838800018528_inline1 says Hertlein. Neither verb looks very satisfactory; Julian probably wrote S0009838800018528_inline2. The Celts tested, or were fabled to test, the legitimacy of children by throwing them into the Rhine; cf. Nonnus, Diunysiaca, xlvi. 54–62.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Meaning in Spinoza’s MethodAlan Nelson and Noa SheinAaron V. Garrett. Meaning in Spinoza’s Method. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xii + 240. Cloth, $60.00.This is a book about some fundamental aspects of Spinoza's mature metaphysics. The principal focus is on Part I of the Ethics concerning infinite substance, and on Part V concerning the intuitive knowledge that is the goal of philosophy. Within this focus, Garrett (...) concentrates on Spinoza's method. Garrett explains how he has been influenced by interpretations that stress the structural parallel between the synthetic, geometrical presentation of the Ethics and the relations among the ideas of the well-ordered mind. The Ethics proceeds by deriving propositions concerning substance's modes from definitions of substance and related notions while the mind, insofar as it is free from emotions, intuitively knows things as following from God. Garrett's distinctive thesis, however, is that Spinozistic enlightenment depends on the process of emending the intellect as described in one of Spinoza's earliest works, the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect. While this work strongly foreshadows many of Spinoza's mature doctrines, its exposition much more closely resembles the analytic, non-geometric approach of Descartes's Meditations. Spinoza's therapy for the emendation of our "inadequate" ideas closely parallels Descartes's analytic therapy for making what he calls confused ideas "clear and distinct."Garrett is on firm ground in arguing that the process of enlightenment cannot be an unbroken chain of intuitive deductions. For one thing, the definitions and axioms printed in a copy of the Ethics are first sensed by the reader and are not likely to produce immediately the requisite adequate ideas (172). An example of one of Garrett's interesting conclusions is that the definition of God as consisting of an infinity of attributes, the sixth of Part I of the Ethics (1D6), is preliminary and replaced in the process of therapeutic emendation by a definition of God as self caused. It is only after our ideas have become adequate at the end of the process that we are able to fully appreciate 1D6 (171).One might think that Garrett does not go far enough here because his point can be naturally extended. Definitions might assist us in the process of bringing our adequate ideas to light, but our cognitive goal is making these ideas themselves adequate. What then are the ideas we can make most adequate and exactly what distinguishes them from highly refined ideas that are nevertheless more inadequate than these? On one interpretation it is divine essence, that is, the attributes of thought and extension that are individually most adequately conceived after successful therapy. It is tempting to suppose that a single idea of God as both thinking and extended would be more adequate still, but Spinoza holds that our conceptions of these attributes are "really distinct" in a sense analogous to Descartes's(1P10). Spinoza's 1D6 definition of God as a substance consisting of both these attributes (and perhaps other inconceivable ones) thus seems to indicate a subsumption of the attributes we can conceive under the image of some printed or spoken words. Such an idea would be more inadequate than our adequate conceptions of the individual attributes. One is here strongly reminded of Descartes's characterization in Article 63 of the first Part of his Principles of Philosophy, "... we more readily understand extended substance or thinking substance than substance alone."In his seventh and concluding chapter, Garrett tackles the grand problems of intuitive knowledge or knowledge of "the third kind" and the sense in which Spinoza thought a part of the human mind is eternal. The discussion is necessarily complex, but one great advantage of Garrett's treatment is that he realizes intuitive knowledge cannot consist in the explicit deduction of particular things from God. The detailed determination of particular "everyday objects" requires sensory knowledge which is, of course, never perfectly determinate and therefore inherently inadequate. But we can acquire the "second kind" of adequate knowledge by understanding what our minds have in common with other determinate, finite things. This finally enables us to ascend to an appreciation of these... (shrink)

In his renowned collection Philosophy as a Way of Life, Pierre Hadot suggests that the original trait of philosophy as a method by which one exercises themselves to achieve a new way of living and seeing the world fails with the rise of modernity. In that time, philosophy increasingly takes on a merely theoretical aspect, tending toward a system. However, Hadot himself glimpses at the dawn of modernity some instances of the original trait of philosophy still very much present, and (...) in his wake, Michel Foucault warns that between the late 16th and early 17th centuries the philosophical question of the reform of the mind attests to a still very close link between asceticism and truth. This book aims to develop just such an idea by thoroughly analyzing the most representative works of the reform of the mind in the early modern period: Francis Bacon's New Organon (1620), René Descartes' Discourse on the Method (1637), and Baruch Spinoza's Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (1677). From this analysis it will emerge that these modern works fully deserve to be counted among the tradition of philosophy as way of life. On closer inspection, the inquiries about method elaborated in these works are fully understandable only when read in the light of a broader and more complex philosophical need: to establish the spiritual conditions for accessing truth and aspiring to full self-realization. (shrink)

St. Thomas Aquinas has always considered intelligence a potency higher than the will, absolutely speaking. That being said, and in my view, the existential primacy of the will in the act of freedom (particularly in choosing the existential end) is also indisputably Thomistic, as Cornelio Fabro has shown. This paper endeavors to explain Aquinas' doctrine on the absolute primacy of the intellect and thus show that these two primacies can be affirmed coherently, that is, the intellect’s absolute primacy (...) and the will’s existential primacy. Firstly, I will explain the reasoning St. Thomas Aquinas uses in the Summa to justify the absolute primacy of the intellect over the will. Secondly, I will explore some parallel texts, in order to shed light on my interpretation of the Summa and expand our view regarding this and related doctrinal points. Thirdly, I will offer a brief study of Fabro’s position, one in which his concerns regarding the intellect’s absolute primacy are taken into account and carefully considered. (shrink)

This paper tries to reread Spinoza’s Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect in a materialist way, construing the criticism and indictments of «methodological idealism» as a wrong way of understanding materialism on its ontological level and, mainly, in its epistemological approach.

Although the idea of a specific nature seems to be incompatible with the rejection of universals in the second part of Spinoza’s Ethics, the notion of human nature is yet clearly used by this philosopher for both descriptive and normative purposes. We can notice this ambiguity, in particular, by examining how the question of human nature is introduced in two famous extracts of his works: at the end of the prologue of The Treatise on the Emendation of the (...) class='Hi'>Intellect and in the preface of the fourth part of the Ethics. On the one hand, Spinoza presents the improvement of human nature as a central goal of his ethical project; on the other hand, he deconstructs, in the foregoing passages, notions such as perfection, imperfection, good and evil, which seem to disqualify those same aims as derived from inadequate ideas. In order to sort out the meaning of those issues, this paper’s leading hypothesis will be that there’s a tension, in Spinoza’s reflection on human nature, between a critical analysis of the inadequate idea of this nature, which comes from imagination, and an attempt to form, by using reason, an adequate idea of it, and to make it play a lead role in the philosophical program and more specifically in its ethical and political stakes. (shrink)

For Descartes, nature must be interpreted through a limited number of simple laws used to describe the multiplicity of the real, focusing on the rule and normality rather than on the exception and monstrosity. Nevertheless, monstrosity has a vital function in Descartes' philosophy. By offering a new reading of the evil genius and the deceiver God in terms of absolute monstrosity, I intend to demonstrate the novel role played by the will in this philosophical ‘teratomachy’. Examining the peculiar status Admiration (...) occupies in the economy of the passions, I also analyze a passage from the Cogitationes circa generatione animalium , the only text in which Descartes explicitly discusses physical monstrosities. I argue that these pages, in which Descartes subscribes to a rigidly mechanistic, epigenetic view of embryology, are in tension with his doctrine of final causes and the idea of continuous creation. My theory is that the entire philosophy of Descartes can be read as a veritable war against a certain idea of monstrosity. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to argue that, for Spinoza, causation is a more fundamental relation than conceptual connection, and that, in fact, it explains conceptual connection. I will firstly offer a criticism of Michael Della Rocca's 2008 claims that, for Spinoza, causal relations are identical to relations of conceptual dependence and that existence is identical to conceivability. Secondly, I will argue that, for Spinoza, causation is more fundamental than conceptual dependence, offering textual evidence from both Treatise on the (...) Emendation of the Intellect and Ethics. In particular, I will offer an interpretation of the attributes as first and foremost causal activities, or powers: this interpretation has the advantage to clarify the role of 1D6 as a “genetic definition.”. (shrink)

Spinoza's Mediate Infinite Mode TAD M. SCHMALTZ IN PART I of the Ethics, Spinoza argued that a modification is infinite just in case it either "follows from the absolute nature of any attribute of God" or "follows from some attribute of God, as it is modified by such a modification" that is infinite. 1 The main purpose of this argument is to bolster the claim later in this text that a finite modification can follow from a divine attribute only insofar (...) as that attribute is modified by another finite modification. 2 Thus it is understandable that in the section that contains the argument Spinoza did not actually affirm the existence of the two kinds of infinite modifications he mentioned, which following standard practice I call "immediate infinite modes" and "mediate infinite modes," respectively.3 Yet in this section he did 'E IP21,D-22,D, G II 65-66/Curley 429-3 o. In the text and notes of this paper I use the following abbreviations pertaining to Spinoza's writings: E: Ethics ; Ep.: Letters ; RDPP: Descartes' Principles of Philosophy ; CM: Appendix containing Metaphysical Thoughts ; KV: Short Treatise ; TdlE: Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect ; G: C. Gebhardt, ed., Spinoza Opera, 4 vols. , cited by volume and page; Curley: E. Curley, trans, and ed., The Collected Works of.. (shrink)

Two stories have dominated the historiography of early modern philosophy: one in which a seventeenth century Age of Reason spawned the Enlightenment, and another in which a skeptical crisis cast a shadow over subsequent philosophy, resulting in ever narrower "limits to knowledge." I combine certain elements common to both into a third narrative, one that begins by taking seriously seventeenth-century conceptions of the topics and methods central to the rise of a "new" philosophy. In this revisionist story, differing approaches to (...) the central subject matter of early modern metaphysics--knowledge of substances through their essences and causal powers--arise as a result of disagreements about the powers of the human cognitive faculties. Methodological writings are seen as attempts to direct readers in the proper use of their cognitive faculties. The early modern rejection of the Aristotelian theory of cognition ranks equally in importance with rejection of Aristotelian doctrines about nature. Skepticism is more often than not a tool to be used in teaching the reader the proper use of the cognitive faculties, or indeed in convincing the reader of the existence or inexistence of certain cognitive faculties or powers. Instead of early modern "epistemology" or "theory of knowledge," one speaks, with seventeenth century writers, of theories of the cognitive faculties and their implications for the possibility of human knowledge. The early modern rejection of Aristotelian logic can then be seen as reflecting a negative assessment about the fit between syllogistic reasoning and logic as an art of reasoning or thinking which refines the use of the cognitive faculties. -/- Central to this new historiography is the story of the relation between the intellect and senses as cognitive faculties or powers. The development of philosophy from Descartes to Kant can be portrayed as a series of claims about the power of the intellect to know the essences of things, with resulting consequences for ontology and the foundations of natural philosophy. I illustrate this revised narrative by comparing three conceptions of the intellect in three philosophical settings, provided by several late scholastic Aristotelians, Descartes, and Locke. I have two aims: first, to exhibit the central role played by the conception of intellect or understanding in these authors, and, second, to locate their discussions of the cognitive faculties in relation to recent understandings of psychology, epistemology, logic, mind, and their relations. Early modern writings do not easily fit into the modern categories of epistemology and psychology; more generally, the early modern concern with the workings of mind does not coincide with recent conceptions of naturalism. These findings can help us to see problems with our current categories. (shrink)

This article examines Abu Nasr al-Farabı (c. 872–950/1) on the topic of intentionality, with particular focus on how intentionality is integral for the constitution of the intellect within his psychology. Unfortunately, targeted study of al-Farabı’s doctrine of intentionality has been largely neglected since Kwame Gyekye’s 1971 essay, The Terms ‘Prima Intentio’ and ‘Secunda Intentio’ in Arabic Logic. Gyekye showed that the Arabic (and thus the Latin) doctrine of first and second intention originated within the texts of al-Farabı,not the texts (...) of Avicenna, as had been previously thought. In response, this article aims to show three things. First, while the doctrine of first and second intention appears in al-Farabı’s texts, it is not as clearly developed or defined as is presented in Gyekye’s 1971 article. al-Farabı both lacks consistent technical terminology for the doctrine (as he discusses it across disparate sciences, in unrelated contexts) and develops it far too little to fully flesh out his doctrine. Second, even given the fact that al-Farabı’s discussion of intentionality is underdeveloped, Gyekye was right to credit the doctrine to him. And third, al-Farabı’s doctrine of first and second intention is not merely important to understand his positions regarding signification and universals; they play a pivotal role in the constitution of the human intellect. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9 5.10 5.11.

Kai Nielsen is one of Canada’s most distinguished political philosophers. In a career spanning over 40 years, he has published more than 400 papers in political philosophy, ethics, meta-philosophy, and philosophy of religion. He has engaged much of the best work in Anglophone political philosophy, shedding light on many of the central debates and controversies of our time but throughout has remained a unique voice on the political left. _ Pessimism of the Intellect _presents a thoughtful collection of Nielsen’s (...) essays complemented by an extended reflective interview with Nielsen. This collection allows the reader to grasp the systematic scope of his thought and methodology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Response 2: “Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will”Antonis BalasopoulosLet me begin with a few words on my title, which was chosen as reflecting the nature of the orientation of my work in the field of utopian studies and therefore also of my orientation toward the theme of this roundtable. As Francesca Antonini puts it in a recent essay, the phrase, which became associated with the work (...) of Antonio Gramsci though it originates in Romain Rolland, describes “the (seemingly contradictory) coexistence of a realistic description of the status quo, on the one hand, and a genuine commitment to the possibility of transforming reality, on the other.”1Anyone who has read Thomas More’s Utopia knows that Rolland’s and Gramsci’s formula very much describes that book’s bifurcation between a voice of relentless critique of what exists in Europe—and particularly in England—in More’s time (in Book 1) and a voice preoccupied with the description of an alternative, and arguably better, world (in Book 2). This bifurcation, it is equally well known, is part of the genetic material More’s book bequeathed to its successors, so that one calls a “utopia” a (mostly, though not always) literary text, where the “realistic description of the status quo” coexists with a vision arising out of a “commitment to the possibility of transforming reality”—admittedly in different admixtures and proportions of [End Page 544] the critical or negative and the anticipatory, projective or prefigurative elements. Though Ernst Bloch’s distinction between “cold” and warm” streams within Marxism is not identical to this first binary, it is certainly related to it, so that the “cold” stream is one that privileges the rational and analytical element (usually, I would propose, in relation to the part of the Marxist tradition we know as “critique of political economy”), while the “warm stream” is one that rather foregrounds that which relates to affect, to desire, hope, or fidelity to the transformative project (these are frequently correlated to those elements of Marxism that correspond to its also being a political and philosophically imbued creed).2 What follows here, then, explores the implications of the dialectical interplay between these two sets of oppositions—and hopefully justifies such insistence on dialectic itself.3To the extent that I can see, the basic themes and areas of concentration in my colleagues’ essays involve decolonizing utopian studies as a project; addressing, in that connection, the heterogeneity of utopianisms that emerge out of a number of marginalized subjectivities; the provenance of the questions of ecology, sustainability, animal life for the present and future of utopian studies (and to some degree, for utopianism’s past); and finally, the question of utopian forms of social activism and therefore also the search for spaces beyond the walls of academic insularity. These are important and largely interconnected questions, but I am afraid I will only have the space to touch on them briefly and sketchily here.In her cogent and multifaceted intervention, Caroline Edwards begins her reflections on the task of decolonizing utopian studies by noting the high investment of fin-de-siècle utopian fiction in notions of industrial progress, noting that such notions have involved “lasting damage” for “Black writers, artists, and thinkers.” Within this framework, she evokes Joseph R. Winters’s argument that “modern notions of progress and freedom are inherently flawed,” since they are founded on the oppressive traditions of capitalism and colonialism. In turn, this leads to an argument against the teleological futurism of most nineteenth-century utopias and in support of the deconstruction of “the idea of historical progress unfolding in Hegelian dialectical stages.” What is to replace this is a hauntological (after Derrida) conception of the relation between the present and the past, for which “the present is always a site of potential breaks and ruptures that can signify both dislocation and pain as well as novelty and possibility.” In a similar vein, Heather Alberro questions the teleological futurism of an earlier tradition of utopia, evoking Laurence Davis’s observation on the importance of [End Page 545] “neglected or suppressed possibilities for qualitatively better forms of life” within the “Now.” The desideratum is, again... (shrink)

Kant holds that the applicability of the moral ‘ought’ depends on a kind of agent-causal freedom that is incompatible with the deterministic structure of phenomenal nature. I argue that Kant understands this determinism to threaten not just morality but the very possibility of our status as rational beings. Rational beings exemplify “cognitive control” in all of their actions, including not just rational willing and the formation of doxastic attitudes, but also more basic cognitive acts such as judging, conceptualizing, and synthesizing.

Many of the contributions offer personal reflections on those events and experiences that helped shape their response to the general issue of faith seeking understanding."--BOOK JACKET.

This article investigates a tension among Aquinas’s basic claims about what constitutes the proper object of the human intellect. Aquinas asserts that the mindhas only one proper object, yet he repeatedly endorses two different candidates for this role: the being of a thing (ens) and a thing’s essence (essentia). One might assume the tension disappears if ens signifies the essence of a thing. Alternatively, the tension seems to dissolve if each operation of the intellect (apprehension and judgment) takes (...) its own object (essence and ens respectively). Although each approach effectively hides the tension from immediate sight, neither genuinely resolves it. This is because neither sufficiently accounts for the features of simplicity and priority Aquinas claims our “first conception of being” must have. Alternatively, I suggest how we might mitigate this tension by treating the intellect itself as having its own proper object (ens) and apprehension as having another (essence). (shrink)