Teaching Documents by Neven Knezevic
In the final lecture on Spinoza's Ethics, we will make a brief overview of Part V of Spinoza's Et... more In the final lecture on Spinoza's Ethics, we will make a brief overview of Part V of Spinoza's Ethics, which is titled, 'Of the Power of the Intellect, or of Human Freedom'. In Part V, Spinoza ties up all of the threads from the previous four parts in order to create an account of freedom in terms of his second and third kinds of knowledge. As we have seen in Spinoza's account of the emotions, there are emotions which are based on adequate ideas and others which are based on inadequate ideas. Of the latter, they may be said to be the experience of our determination by external and not internal causes. According to Spinoza, a transcendent understanding of the world provides one with deep and sublime emotions capable of overcoming these externally conditioned affections, and it is by this understanding that we find our freedom. Thus, we will survey Spinoza's accounts of emotions, concepts , knowledge, and the power of knowledge over the emotions as it is presented in Part V, with specific attention to propositions 4, 6, 10, 25, and 39.
In our sixth lecture on Spinoza's Ethics, we'll be covering Part IV of the Ethics, titled 'Of Hum... more In our sixth lecture on Spinoza's Ethics, we'll be covering Part IV of the Ethics, titled 'Of Human Bondage, or the Strength of the Emotions'. In Part IV, Spinoza carries on from Part III, giving an overview of the way emotions relate to human freedom through his account of goodness and evil, adequate ideas, and parallel causation. Instead of the detailed work through Spinoza's arguments, this lecture will instead focus on the psychological dimensions of Spinoza's conclusions and draw some real-world connections from his system. We will explore Spinoza's account of the emotions in light of his view of goodness and badness, and then explore the power of the emotions to influence us despite our rational powers. The lecture concludes with Spinoza's account of virtues and with an eye towards the power to maximize freedom through virtue.
In this first of seven lectures on Spinoza, we will briefly cover his life and thought, the aim o... more In this first of seven lectures on Spinoza, we will briefly cover his life and thought, the aim of the Ethics and its geometric approach, and we will briefly survey the main themes of Part I of the Ethics, which is on God, Substance, Freedom, and Necessity. Much of this survey will borrow from the late Timothy Sprigge's work The God of Metaphysics. Sprigge, an idealist and contemporary thinker, had a closer affinity to Spinoza's thought than many Spinoza scholars, and it is my opinion that in terms of scholarship, an affinity of thought lends to stronger understanding than a difference of thought, for there are nuances an outsider won't see that an insider will know all too well. The ultimate insider for idealists is Sprigge, and The God of Metaphysics provides a wonderful introduction to Spinoza's monism and pantheism.
In the fourth and fifth of seven lectures on Spinoza, we will cover Part III of his Ethics and ex... more In the fourth and fifth of seven lectures on Spinoza, we will cover Part III of his Ethics and explore Spinoza's a priori doctrine of human emotions. As in the previous lectures, we will do a survey and overview of the key points of the given section. Unlike our previous lectures, we will be starting from the end of the chapter rather than the beginning, because the most insightful summaries of Spinoza's doctrine of the emotions lay there. The pace and attention to detail on Spinoza's arguments will also be relaxed in order to draw attention to the historical significance of Part III. We will begin with the definition of the conatus and discuss this in detail, and then go to Spinoza's end-of-chapter section defining the emotions. We will also draw attention to a definite albeit coincidental connection between Spinoza's doctrine of emotions and Nietzsche's doctrine of the Will to Power. We will look at emotions as affects, the definition of emotions, and then examine Spinoza's system of atomic and compound emotions. The basic compound emotions will be covered briefly and the general principles guiding the combinations of atomic emotions will be discussed, along with a brief overview of some miscellaneous psychological topics that come up in Part III.
In this second of seven lectures on Spinoza, we will cover Part II of the Ethics and survey Spino... more In this second of seven lectures on Spinoza, we will cover Part II of the Ethics and survey Spinoza's account of the mind and his epistemology. As in our previous lecture, we will give a detailed survey of a small subset of propositions in the Ethics, and we will briefly look through the main aspects of this section. We will look at Spinoza's account of mind-body parallelism and its relation to his rationalism; the foundations of his philosophy of mind; his account of the motions of bodies and the way in which this builds upon the mind's awareness of the body; Spinoza's account of truth and error and of adequate and inadequate ideas; Spinoza's three types of knowledge; and the basis of his psychology of the body as it will relate to Part III.
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Teaching Documents by Neven Knezevic