Metaphysical Rationalism

The Cambridge Critical Guide to Spinoza's Ethics, Yitzhak Melamed, ed. Cambridge, 2017

The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza's Ethics, 2009

In the preface to Part 5 of the Ethics Spinoza promises to explain "the power of the mind, or of reason" and to "show, above all, how great its dominion over the affects is, and what kind of dominion it has for restraining and moderating them." This is an important task because of the ethical significance that Spinoza accords to reason. For example, Spinoza writes, Acting absolutely from virtue is nothing else in us but acting, living, and preserving our being. .. by the guidance of reason. (4p24)

"Spinoza is the rationalist philosopher par excellence, making every conceivable emancipatory claim for reason in delineating the connection of reason to freedom and power. Spinoza develops a philosophy which affirms the emancipatory function of reason. This kind of philosophy has been challenged in recent times by postmodernist modes of thought. Whereas Spinoza affirms knowledge as power in a positive sense, the likes of Michel Foucault argue a knowledge/power nexus that savours more of an Hobbesian ceaseless conflict. Foucault’s equation of all forms of knowledge with the endless exercise of a power, the effects of which may be discursively placed but whose authority cannot be subject to rational criticism, explicitly denies the emancipatory function that Spinoza assigned to reason. Free of such rational critique, discourse inspired by Foucault lacks political and ethical import. Not surprisingly, Foucault’s work has proved itself to be compatible with a wide range of political platforms, spanning the spectrum from New Left to New Right. This political ambivalence directly follows from the loss of an ethical position owing to the denial of rational critique. The distinguishing characteristic of ‘the Left’ in both politics and ethics has been the commitment not just to challenge existing power structures in favour of the poor, the marginalized and the suppressed but to associate this challenge with a commitment to distinguish truth from ideological mystification and obfuscation. In connecting his rational philosophy with democratic politics, Spinoza is a ‘Left’ thinker in this grand tradition. This thesis highlights the ‘radical’ aspects of Spinoza’s rationalist philosophy, finding inspiration in his God-Nature relation, his democratic politics and his commitment to free rational thinking as subversive of all forms of coercive or state-sanctioned religious doctrine. The book argues that Spinoza makes it possible to resist the postmodernist drift by affirming the possibility of separating truth from illusion, reason from rhetoric. In this manner, philosophy can retain its emancipatory function and engage the political, social and economic issues of the day in a critical and emancipatory sense. In delineating the terms of freedom, knowledge and power and in showing their connection to each other, Spinoza offers a means of resisting the relativising tendencies of contemporary theory and, indeed, the way that this relativism in ethics serves existing power and entrenches the forces of political conservatism. The truth, for Spinoza, is the product not of consensus-belief but of rational critique which subjects existing norms and values to question. Not the least of Spinoza’s achievements is to have shown how such rational critique – the very stuff of philosophy – is no longer an elitist concern leading to the philosopher-ruler but has the potential to emancipate all humankind, since knowledge is key to an active relation to the world." This book has now been published and is available for purchase.

criticism of Reason in Spinoza and introduction of multiple reasons in his works, 2022

After a "geometric critical" reading of Ethics about reason, this article (A-3) poses the thesis of multiple reasons about anything, then applies this thesis to different concepts developed by Spinoza in his writings, and finally underlines the desires of Spinoza that deeply pushed his writings.

The idea of reason in Spinoza's political thought 1State and reason

Oxford Handbook of Spinoza

This chapter investigates Spinoza's commitment to the Principle of Sufficient Reason (the PSR) and its role in his system. What sorts of things does Spinoza think require a cause or explanation? What counts, for him, as a cause or explanation? The PSR is often associated with doctrines such as necessitarianism, the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles, the Principle of Plenitude, and the existence of God. Some commentators have alleged that Spinoza's commitment to the PSR leads him to accept all of these doctrines. This paper examines each of these doctrines as they pertain to Spinoza's commitment to the PSR and his metaphysics more generally.

Bijdragen, 2011

The Young Spinoza, Melamed and Garber (eds.). Oxford University Press.

Spinoza’s account of reason in the Short Treatise has been largely neglected. That account, I argue, has at least four features which distinguish it from that of the Ethics: in the Short Treatise, (1) reason is more sharply distinguished from the intuitive knowledge, (2) reason deals with things as though they were ‘outside’ us, (3) reason lacks clarity and distinctness, and (4) reason has no power over many types of passions. I argue that these differences have a unified explanation, consisting of a principle that Spinoza accepts in both works and a central change. The other changes follow from the central one in conjunction with the principle. The principle is that "whatever we find in ourselves has more power over us than anything which comes from outside," and the change is in making the objects of reason common things/common notions. Understanding this, I claim, sheds important light on the psychological and epistemological motivations behind Spinoza's mature doctrines.

Australasian Philosophical Review, 2020

Spinoza's epistemology is complex, with both a rationalist and an intuitionist side. The key to understanding Spinoza's epistemology is to focus on the notion of intuitive knowledge (scientia intuitiva), which provides an immediate, non-discursive knowledge of its singular object. Intellectual knowledge in Spinoza's philosophy has an affective component: it is a form of love, and ultimately, given Spinoza's monistic metaphysics, it is a form of the intellectual love of God (amor Dei intellectualis). This note will insist with Lloyd's 'Reconsidering Spinoza's Rationalism' that such a doctrine is an integral part of Spinoza's philosophy. However, the approach relies on a somewhat different but complementary route to Lloyd's, with special attention to Spinoza's philosophy of geometry and his immersion in medieval Jewish philosophy.

Debating Dispositions, 2009