Heidi Ravven

Hamilton College, Religious Studies, Faculty Member

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In The Self Beyond Itself: An Alternative History of Ethics, the New Brain Sciences, and the Myth of Free Will (The New Press, May 2013), I offer an argument for a new vision of ethics, one that takes into account history, philosophy, neuroscience, and psychology.
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“Ranging from American elementary schools to Holocaust rescuers, and from contemporary neuroscience to Jewish and Arab medieval thought, this book shatters the many bubbles that contemporary philosophers have built around themselves. Its criticisms of free will are historically grounded and logically cogent; its alternative views of freedom and moral agency, drawing largely on Spinoza, are persuasive and much-needed. This book will generate wide discussion in academic fields—and break new paths for society as a whole.”
--John McCumber, Professor of Germanic Languages, UCLA
Phone: 3156555424
Address: 36 Albany Street

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Philip N Pettit

Princeton University

Gunnar Björnsson

Stockholm University

Don Ross

University College Cork

Armando Salvatore

McGill University

Brian Leiter

University of Chicago

Martin van Bruinessen

Universiteit Utrecht

Roe Fremstedal

Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Armando Marques-Guedes

UNL - New University of Lisbon

Giulia Sissa

Ucla

Martin O'Neill

University of York

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Papers by Heidi Ravven

Spinoza’s Rupture with Tradition— His Hints of a Jewish Modernity

SUNY Press eBooks, Feb 1, 2012

I argue in this paper that Spinoza's concern is social psychology more than individual psycho... more

Guest Editor’s Page

Philosophy and Theology, 2001

16 Jewish Philosophy, Ethics, and the New Brain Sciences

BRILL eBooks, 2014

A time for Emil Fackenheim, a time for Baruch Spinoza

BRILL eBooks, 2008

In To Mend the World Emil Fackenheim poses modern Jewish identity as a philosophical issue about ... more In To Mend the World Emil Fackenheim poses modern Jewish identity as a philosophical issue about which we must each make a choice, and that choice is between Baruch Spinoza and Franz Rosenzweig. Fackenheim seems to side with, or use as his alter ego, a New Spinoza, one who would live in our time and therefore have revised his views in response to recent history. The author thinks that Fackenheim's return to Spinoza to rehabilitate him as an imagined contemporary Spinoza who has seen what we've seen stems from Spinoza's proto-Zionism, which resonates with Fackenheim's own philosophical historicism and with his Judaism entering history and political life perhaps more than does Franz Rosenzweig's Judaism as symbolizing eternity. Spinoza believed, there might also be an Israel, and that polity, unlike the modern democratic one, a revival in detail and not just in universalized concept, of the ancient biblical state. Keywords: Baruch Spinoza; Emil Fackenheim; Franz Rosenzweig; modern Jewish identity; philosophical historicism; Spinoza's proto-Zionism

Spinoza on Education of the Emotions

Spinoza’s Ethics of ratio: discovering and applying a spinozan model of human nature

Ethics and Education, Feb 24, 2020

ABSTRACT I argue that Spinoza attributes to society the role of moral educator, a role that is to... more ABSTRACT I argue that Spinoza attributes to society the role of moral educator, a role that is to be carried out via Religion and Politics and hence also via an educational system. In his account, the social body is given the task of applying and transmitting a notion of virtue whose criterion is enhanced freedom, yet that freedom paradoxically must be acquired initially via authoritative coercive rules of praxis. The aim is to achieve an infinite broadening of perspective upon oneself and upon the world and a consequent transformation of one’s motivations and desires from narrowly self-serving to infinitely inclusive. Intellectual virtue is exposed as the necessary and only true fulfillment of the virtue of moral models for it has achieved ‘the knowledge of the union that the mind has with the whole of Nature.’ Yet that intellectual virtue is not ready to hand but must be taught, and teaching necessarily entails an initial measure of authoritative transmission and even coercion, and hence moral models to be internalized.

Hegel’s Epistemic Turn—Or Spinoza’s?

Idealistic Studies, 2003

This paper takes issue with Slavoj Zizek's constructed opposition between Spinoza and Hegel. ... more This paper takes issue with Slavoj Zizek's constructed opposition between Spinoza and Hegel. Where Zizek views Hegel's non-dualistic relational epistemology as a substantial improvement over Spinoza's purported dogmatic account of a reality which is external to the perceiver, I argue that Hegel inherited such an epistemology from Spinoza. Ultimately, it is Spinoza who provides Hegel with the conceptual tools for knowledge of the "transphenomenal" within the context of human finitude.

Steven B. Smith. Spinoza, Liberalism and the Question of Jewish Identity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. xvi, 270 pp

Ajs Review-the Journal of The Association for Jewish Studies, Apr 1, 2001

Heidi Ravven

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