Author: Eugene Garver
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022657573X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 316
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Book Description
Spinoza’s Ethics, and its project of proving ethical truths through the geometric method, have attracted and challenged readers for more than three hundred years. In Spinoza and the Cunning of Imagination, Eugene Garver uses the imagination as a guiding thread to this work. Other readers have looked at the imagination to account for Spinoza’s understanding of politics and religion, but this is the first inquiry to see it as central to the Ethics as a whole—imagination as a quality to be cultivated, and not simply overcome. ?Spinoza initially presents imagination as an inadequate and confused way of thinking, always inferior to ideas that adequately represent things as they are. It would seem to follow that one ought to purge the mind of imaginative ideas and replace them with rational ideas as soon as possible, but as Garver shows, the Ethics don’t allow for this ultimate ethical act until one has cultivated a powerful imagination. This is, for Garver, “the cunning of imagination.” The simple plot of progress becomes, because of the imagination, a complex journey full of reversals and discoveries. For Garver, the “cunning” of the imagination resides in our ability to use imagination to rise above it.
Author: Hasana Sharp
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022679248X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 255
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Book Description
There have been many Spinozas over the centuries: atheist, romantic pantheist, great thinker of the multitude, advocate of the liberated individual, and rigorous rationalist. The common thread connecting all of these clashing perspectives is Spinoza’s naturalism, the idea that humanity is part of nature, not above it. In this sophisticated new interpretation of Spinoza’s iconoclastic philosophy, Hasana Sharp draws on his uncompromising naturalism to rethink human agency, ethics, and political practice. Sharp uses Spinoza to outline a practical wisdom of “renaturalization,” showing how ideas, actions, and institutions are never merely products of human intention or design, but outcomes of the complex relationships among natural forces beyond our control. This lack of a metaphysical or moral division between humanity and the rest of nature, Sharp contends, can provide the basis for an ethical and political practice free from the tendency to view ourselves as either gods or beasts. Sharp’s groundbreaking argument critically engages with important contemporary thinkers—including deep ecologists, feminists, and race and critical theorists—making Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization vital for a wide range of scholars.
Author: Eugene Garver
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 1459606108
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 590
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Book Description
What is the good life? Posing this question today would likely elicit very different answers. Some might say that the good life means doing good - improving one's community and the lives of others. Others might respond that it means doing well - cultivating one's own abilities in a meaningful way. But for Aristotle these two distinct ideas - doi...
Author: Christopher Skeaff
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022655550X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 189
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Book Description
In this pathbreaking work, Christopher Skeaff argues that a profoundly democratic conception of judgment is at the heart of Spinoza’s thought. Bridging Continental and Anglo-American scholarship, critical theory, and Spinoza studies, Becoming Political offers a historically sensitive, meticulous, and creative interpretation of Spinoza’s texts that reveals judgment as the communal element by which people generate power to resist domination and reconfigure the terms of their political association. If, for Spinoza, judging is the activity which makes a people powerful, it is because it enables them to contest the project of ruling and demonstrate the political possibility of being equally free to articulate the terms of their association. This proposition differs from a predominant contemporary line of argument that treats the people’s judgment as a vehicle of sovereignty—a means of defining and refining the common will. By recuperating in Spinoza’s thought a “vital republicanism,” Skeaff illuminates a line of political thinking that decouples democracy from the majoritarian aspiration to rule and aligns it instead with the project of becoming free and equal judges of common affairs. As such, this decoupling raises questions that ordinarily go unasked: what calls for political judgment, and who is to judge? In Spinoza’s vital republicanism, the political potential of life and law finds an affirmative relationship that signals the way toward a new constitutionalism and jurisprudence of the common.
Author: Antonio Negri
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816636709
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 308
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Book Description
In this essential rereading of Spinoza's (1632-1677) philosophical and political writings, Negri positions this thinker within the historical context of the development of the modern state and its attendant political economy. Through a close examination of Spinoza, Negri reveals turn as unique among his contemporaries for his nondialectical approach to social organization in a bourgeois age.
Author: Lorraine Smith Pangle
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022668816X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
A close and selective commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, offering a novel interpretation of Aristotle’s teachings on the relation between reason and moral virtue. What does it mean to live a good life or a happy life, and what part does reason play in the quest for fulfillment? Lorraine Smith Pangle shows how Aristotle’s arguments for virtue as the core of happiness and for reason as the guide to virtue emerge in response to Socrates’s paradoxical claim that virtue is knowledge and vice is ignorance. Against Socrates, Aristotle does justice to the effectual truth of moral responsibility—that our characters do indeed depend on our own voluntary actions. But he also incorporates Socratic insights into the close interconnection of passion and judgment and the way passions and bad habits work not to overcome knowledge that remains intact but to corrupt the knowledge one thinks one has. Reason and Character presents fresh interpretations of Aristotle’s teaching on the character of moral judgment and moral choice, on the way reason finds the mean—especially in justice—and on the relation between practical and theoretical wisdom.
Author: Berthold Auerbach
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Philosophers
Languages : en
Pages : 462
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Book Description
Author: Valtteri Viljanen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139501461
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 209
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Book Description
This work examines the unique way in which Benedict de Spinoza (1632–77) combines two significant philosophical principles: that real existence requires causal power and that geometrical objects display exceptionally clearly how things have properties in virtue of their essences. Valtteri Viljanen argues that underlying Spinoza's psychology and ethics is a compelling metaphysical theory according to which each and every genuine thing is an entity of power endowed with an internal structure akin to that of geometrical objects. This allows Spinoza to offer a theory of existence and of action - human and non-human alike - as dynamic striving that takes place with the same kind of necessity and intelligibility that pertain to geometry. Viljanen's fresh and original study will interest a wide range of readers in Spinoza studies and early modern philosophy more generally.
Author: Barbara Adam
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745669395
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 346
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Book Description
Time is at the forefront of contemporary scholarly inquiry across the natural sciences and the humanities. Yet the social sciences have remained substantially isolated from time-related concerns. This book argues that time should be a key part of social theory and focuses concern upon issues which have emerged as central to an understanding of today's social world. Through her analysis of time Barbara Adam shows that our contemporary social theories are firmly embedded in Newtonian science and classical dualistic philosophy. She exposes these classical frameworks of thought as inadequate to the task of conceptualizing our contemporary world of standardized time, computers, nuclear power and global telecommunications.
Author: Erica Burman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351611410
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 361
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Book Description
Bridging childhood studies, pedagogy and educational theory, critical psychology, and postcolonial studies, this unique book reads the role and functions of ‘the child’ and childhood as both cultural motif and as embodied life condition through the work of Frantz Fanon. Based on innovative readings of Fanon and postcolonial cultural studies, the book offers new insights for critical pedagogical and transformative practice in forging crucial links not only between the political and the psychological, but between distress, therapy, and (personal and political) learning and transformation. Structured around four indicative and distinct forms of ‘child’ read from Fanon’s texts (Idiotic, Traumatogenic, Therapeutic, Extemic), the author discusses both educational and therapeutic practices. The pedagogical links the political with the personal, and Fanon’s revolutionary psychoaffective account offers vital resources to inform these. Finally the book presents ‘child as method’ as a new analytical approach by which to read the geopolitical, which shows childhood, education, and critical psychological studies to be key to these at the level of theory, method, and practice. By interrogating contemporary modalities of childhood as modern economic and political tropes, the author offers conceptual and methodological resources for practically engaging with and transforming these. This book will be vital and fascinating reading for students and scholars in psychology, psychoanalysis, education and childhood studies, gender studies, postcolonial studies, and mental health.
