O objetivo deste trabalho é investigar as implicações políticas da negação do livre-arbítrio da vontade na filosofia de Bento de Espinosa. Trata-se de compreender como é possível pensar a vida em sociedade sem recorrer à livre vontade humana para punir os atos contrários aos direitos comuns. Se o ser humano possui livre-arbítrio para fazer ou deixar de fazer algo, isto é, se a vontade é causa total das ações humanas, é compreensível que as pessoas sejam punidas por suas ações que são prejudiciais à liberdade comum, já que poderiam perfeitamente ter escolhido agir de outra forma. Contudo, em uma filosofia como a espinosana, para a qual a liberdade da vontade não passa de um preconceito e para a qual tudo ocorre necessária e não contingentemente, é preciso indagar qual a melhor maneira de lidar com as injustiças que causam danos aos cidadãos. / The aim of this research is to investigate the political implications of the denial of the free will in Spinozas philosophy. Our goal is to understand how is it possible to think about social life without having to resort to human free will to punish the acts that are contrary to the common rights. If human beings have the free will to do or to avoid doing something, that is, if the will is the total cause of human actions, it is comprehensible that a person is punished for acting against the common freedom, because the person could have chosen otherwise. However, in a philosophy like that of Spinoza, in which the freedom of the will is just a prejudice and everything happens necessarily, not contingently, we must inquire what is the best way to deal with the injustices that do harm to the citizens.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Graduate Theological Union, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 269-273). Also available on the Internet.

The study aims to explain the role of external causes in René Descartes’s (1594–1650) and Benedictus de Spinoza’s (1632–1677) accounts of the mastery of the passions. It consists in three parts: the mind-body union, the passions and their classification, and the mastery of the passions. In the first part I argue that Descartes’s conception of the mind-body union consists in two elements: mind-body interaction and the experience of being one with the body. Spinoza rejects the first element because there cannot be psychophysical laws. He accepts the second element, but goes beyond Descartes, arguing that the mind and body are identical. In the second part I discuss the classifications of the passions in the Passions of the Soul and the Ethics and compare them with the one Spinoza presents in the Short Treatise. I explain that hilaritas is an affect that expresses bodily equilibrium and makes it possible for the mind to be able think in a great many ways. Furthermore, I consider the principles of imagination that along with imitation and the striving to persevere provide a causal explanation for the necessary occurrence of the passions. In the last part I argue that in Descartes the external conditions do not have a significant role in the mastery of the passions. For Spinoza, however, they are necessary. Commentators like Jonathan Bennett fail to see this. Hilaritas requires a diversity of sensual pleasures to occur. As Medea’s case shows, reason is not detached from Nature. Spinoza attempts to form a stronger human nature and to enable as many people as possible to think adequately. His recognition of the need for appropriate external conditions and a society in which ideas can be expressed freely allows him to present an ethics with a practical application, instead of another utopia or fiction.

<p>Affects are not reducible to feelings or emotions. On the contrary, Affect Before </p><p>Spinoza investigates the extent to which affects exceed, reconfigure and reorganize </p><p>bodies and subjects. Affects are constitutive of and integral to dynamic economies of </p><p>activity and passivity. This dissertation traces the origins and histories of this definition </p><p>of affect, from the Latin affectus, discovering emergent affective approaches to faith, </p><p>devotional poetry and philosophy in early modernity. For early modern believers across </p><p>confessions, faith was neither reducible to a dry intellectual concern nor to a personal, </p><p>emotional appeal to God. Instead, faith was a transformative relation between humans </p><p>and God, realized in affective terms that, in turn, reconfigured theories of human agency </p><p>and activity. Beginning with John Calvin and continuing through the work of John </p><p>Donne, John Milton, and Baruch Spinoza, Affect Before Spinoza posits affectus as a basis </p><p>of faith in an emergent Reformed tradition as well as a term that informs disparate </p><p>developments in poetry and philosophy beyond Reformed Orthodoxy. Calvin's </p><p>configuration of affect turns existing languages of the passions and of rhetorical motives </p><p>towards an understanding of faith and certainty. In this sense, Calvin, Donne, Spinoza </p><p>and Milton use affectus to pose questions of agency, will, tendency, inclination, and </p><p>determinism.</p> / Dissertation

The main objective of this master&rsquo / s thesis is to analyze the place assigned to the phenomenon of desire by Hegel and Spinoza, and to show that the main difference between two philosophers in terms of their understanding of desire and human phenomenon consists in their understanding of the relation between the substance and particulars. In order to fulfill the requirements of this objective, what is focused on is, as different from a certain philosophical thought excluding desire from a true account of human phenomenon due to two aspects of desire, namely being an immediate drive and being purely self-referential, which are not regarded as being capable of explaining the specific distinctness of human being, how Spinoza and Hegel give an account of desire, and how they conceive mentioned aspects of desire. Throughout the thesis, first Spinoza&rsquo / s ontology, as it is elaborated in the Ethics, and the place of the phenomenon of desire in this ontology are explained. Then through an analysis of the fourth chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit, it is argued that Hegel&rsquo / s conception of desire enables one to conceive the distinctive human institutions such as sociality, morality, and etc., as derivatives of desire. Finally it is argued that, since Hegel conceives the relation between the substance and particulars as a total detachment, he is able to give the spiritual dimension of human phenomenon in terms of desire. In this way moreover the specific distinctness of the human phenomenon is preserved in the philosophy of Hegel.

Texte remanié de: Ph. D. th.--Amsterdam, 1999. / Bibliogr. p. 205-216. Index.

Proefschrift Groningen.

Spinoza hat durch die mathematische Form, in der er sein Hauptwerk, die 'Ethica', abfaßte, der in seiner Zeit viel bedachten, aber kaum diskutierten Frage der philosophischen Methode einen Angriffspunkt gegeben. Sehr zum Nachteil für seine Lehre, denn schon in der zeitgenössischen Rezeption bildete sich das später (bei Christian Wolff beispielsweise) herrschende Urteil, in der 'Ethica' würden atheistische Thesen unter dem Schutz einer exakten Methode für wahr ausgegeben. Die Widerlegungen des Spinozismus bemühten sich demzufolge entweder auf dem Feld der Beweise und Voraussetzungen um den Nachweis der Fehlerhaftigkeit oder sie hielten die Argumentation für unangreifbar und schten den atheistischen Charakter einzelner Lehrsätze aufzuzeigen. Beide Verfahren der Zurückweisung des Spinozismus basierten auf der Unanfechtbarkeit des methodischen Ideals (das man in einem Fall für falsch angewendet, im anderen für unwiderleglich durchgeführt sah). Spinozas Philosophie ist in der Tat (nicht nur der äußeren Form der Ethica nach) mit dem Problem der philosophischen Methode beschäftigt, wie es die Schrift aus den frühen sechziger Jahren, der 'Tractatus de intellectus emendatione', beweist. Dort findet sich eine allgemeine Theorie der Methode als Philosophie. Spinoza thematisiert die Idee der Methode und deren Form also von Beginn an auf einer anderen Ebene als zu seiner Zeit etwa Descartes, Pascal, Hobbes oder die Autoren der 'Logique de Port-Royal', Arnauld und Nicole. Jene haben die philosophische Methode mit den Verfahren der Analyse und Synthese (Descartes), oder unter logischen und rhetorischen Gesichtspunkten (Pascal) diskutiert, beziehungsweise beide Standpunkte beisammen abgehandelt (Arnauld und Nicole). Einzig Hobbes kommt mit seinem Entwurf eines Wissenschaftssystems mit mathematischer Ordnung dem Ideal Spinozas nahe. Den historischen Kontext, wie er hier kurz skizziert ist, nimmt die folgende Unternsuchung zum Anlaß, sich eingehend mit dem Problem der Methode in der Philosophie Spinozas zu beschäftigen. Sie berücksichtigt dazu vor allem den unvollendeten 'Tractatus'. Von dessen Definitionslehre nimmt sie ihren Ausgang, weil diese als Kernstück der Methodologie eine Frage aufwirft, deren Lösung Spinoza in der 'Ethica' versucht. Zudem ist Spinozas Theorie der Definition noch nicht zusammenhängend erläutert worden. Die 'Überständigkeit' der im 'Tractatus' formulierten Frage (einer philosophischen Methode), der auch die Erkenntnistheorie der 'Ethica' keine endgültige Antwort gibt, lenkt die Untersuchung zum Abschluß auf eine Erklärung des mos geometricus, dessen philosophische Relevanz erst vor dem Hintergrund des ursprünglich methodologischen Problems erkennbar werden kann.

My dissertation lays out some of the chief philosophical precursors to Jonathan Israel's Radical Enlightenment. It investigates the principal question of Will Durant's The Age of Voltaire: "How did it come about that a major part of the educated classes in Europe and America has lost faith in the theology that for fifteen centuries gave supernatural sanctions and supports to the precarious and uncongenial moral code upon which Western civilization has been based?" The aim of this project is both broad and specific: the first is to provide a general history of the philosophical precursors to the Radical Enlightenment up until the early modern period, and the second is to highlight one of these precursors in detail, which I do in the large Spinoza part. With the assistance of a great deal of scholarship in philosophy of religion, history of philosophy, theological analysis, biblical criticism, and historiography, my dissertation contends that the major philosophical precursors against orthodox faith in revelation and for the Radical Enlightenment have been derived primarily from several forces. I present some of the general arguments of some of the pre-Socratics and Greek philosophers, especially Socrates and Plato, emphasizing their rationalist and non-theological thinking. Then I point out how some of this Greek philosophical literature led to new philosophical and theological elements in some of the teachings of the Church Fathers, some of the medievals, and some of the scholastics, up to the early modern period. The core of my argument, however, begins to pick up steam at the Renaissance. With the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, and the early Enlightenment New Philosophy, everything changes. Renaissance textual criticism of ancient texts leads to the beginnings of some genuine biblical criticism. The explosion of naturalist-leaning explanations of nature via Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes and many others in the Scientific Revolution leads many to wonder if God is needed. The rejection of Aristotelian and Scholastic metaphysics by the New Philosophers, most notably, Descartes, undermine what for many provided the philosophical underpinnings for the Church and theology. And then "the most unkindest cut of all," the revolutionary historical and textual criticism of the Bible (by many early Enlightenment philosophers, especially Spinoza) which utterly undermines and refutes Judaism and Christianity.

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