{"title":"The Year 1663 and the Spinozist Identity of Being and Power: Hypothesis on a Development","authors":"A. Matheron","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474440103.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474440103.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Following the work of the French Spinoza scholar Bernard Rousset, Matheron here endeavours to read Spinoza’s interpretation of Descartes by examining how Spinoza himself critically reworked two of his own earlier texts so as to ultimately establish the identity of being and power. It is thus in 1663 that Spinoza finally develops and lays out the key feature of his mature philosophy, namely, the definition of God as an absolutely infinite substance whose formulation and re-formulation across multiple drafts Matheron re-establishes. He then turns to Spinoza’s own critical reflections on his earlier Principles of Cartesian Philosophy, which sets the stage for grasping the development of Spinoza’s thought as it moves towards its ultimate philosophical originality as displayed in the Ethics.","PeriodicalId":229413,"journal":{"name":"Politics, Ontology and Knowledge in Spinoza","volume":"13 2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123591885","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Is the State, According to Spinoza, an Individual in Spinoza’s Sense?","authors":"A. Matheron","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474440103.003.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474440103.003.0012","url":null,"abstract":"In this chapter, Matheron responds to debates in the Anglophone and Francophone literature concerning the nature of the State in Spinoza’s philosophy: ought it to be called an ‘individual’ in Spinoza’s sense of the term? By rigorously comparing Spinoza’s Ethics with numerous passages found in Spinoza’s political writings, Matheron presents what he calls a quasi-‘philological perspective’ that pays close attention to Spinoza’s Latin text and its subsequent translations into French and English. This leads Matheron to a discussion of whether or not a political society can be said to have a conatus in the Spinozist understanding of the term, which in turn leads to a discussion of natural and juridical laws. Matheron concludes with a problem: does the State have a ‘soul’ in the same way the human individual does, that is, as an idea of the body?","PeriodicalId":229413,"journal":{"name":"Politics, Ontology and Knowledge in Spinoza","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125269290","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Essence, Existence and Power in Part I of the Ethics: The Foundations of Proposition 16","authors":"A. Matheron","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474440103.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474440103.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"In this essay, Matheron investigates the philosophical foundations of Proposition 16 of Part I of Spinoza’s Ethics, which states that God, by virtue of being an absolute infinite being, necessarily produces an infinite number of things and effects. Such a startling claim, Matheron argues, is in fact well founded and can be understood by returning to the important demonstrative moves Spinoza makes in the preceding moments of Part I. By turning to Proposition 7 and its two scholia, Propositions 9 and 10, and the Scholium to Proposition 11, Matheron meticulously reconstructs Spinoza’s argument according to which God is conceived as immanent productive power that inexhaustibly gives rise to all logical structures. In turn, Matheron concludes, the demonstration opens onto Spinoza’s famous theory of conatus.","PeriodicalId":229413,"journal":{"name":"Politics, Ontology and Knowledge in Spinoza","volume":"45 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116206498","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Ontological Status of Scripture and the Spinozist Doctrine of Individuality","authors":"A. Matheron","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474440103.003.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474440103.003.0013","url":null,"abstract":"Do the products of human work, in particular, those that are literary or scriptural in nature, correspond to Spinoza’s definition of an individual? At first glance, such a question seems absurd, but in this essay Matheron endeavours to show that precisely such a conception is the case. Despite the various Holy Books all seeming to blend superstition and history, Matheron, following Spinoza, argues that each, regardless of their empirical genesis, aim to communicate a basic message to readers: the demand for justice and charity based on the love of God. But is the communication of this message merely a metaphor for the way individuals for Spinoza are said to be composed of various bodies that communicate their movements to one another? Not at all. Scripture quite literally communicates with the bodies and minds of its readers consequently affecting their behaviour.","PeriodicalId":229413,"journal":{"name":"Politics, Ontology and Knowledge in Spinoza","volume":"44 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132031934","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Spinoza and Sexuality","authors":"A. Matheron","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474440103.003.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474440103.003.0016","url":null,"abstract":"In this striking chapter Matheron deals directly with the seemingly bizarre claims that Spinoza makes about women and sexuality in his writings. By reconstructing the context in which Spinoza makes seven at first glance prudish or scandalous claims about women and sexuality, Matheron effectively eliminates every misunderstanding and misreading that has arisen in the nearly 400 years since Spinoza published his major works. Spinoza’s radical anti-teleology and theory of desire lead Matheron to lay out the arguments for a number of memorable claims: that Spinoza might be the only early modern philosopher—and perhaps one of the rare philosophers from any period—whose views can ground the reality of non-genital sexuality, that the passions to which men are subject, and not women, are responsible for sexual drama, and that women are in no way incapable of becoming sages in the Spinozist sense.","PeriodicalId":229413,"journal":{"name":"Politics, Ontology and Knowledge in Spinoza","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134025535","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Spinoza and Property","authors":"A. Matheron","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474440103.003.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474440103.003.0015","url":null,"abstract":"Though Spinoza did not write much explicitly concerning the subject of property, Matheron, in this essay, makes the convincing case that Spinoza nonetheless had a rich and compelling view on the matter as it was understood in the context of the 17th century. Spinoza’s decisive innovation, against Hobbes and all of his other predecessors is to conceive of right as a physical power, as opposed to a moral power. In other words, right is coextensive with the real power to do whatever one desires to do, which is, quite simply, whatever they actually do in fact do. The inevitable human desire to possess external objects, be they land or money, serves as the basis for Matheron’s analysis of Spinoza’s political philosophy. Matheron concludes with a number of striking claims about Spinoza’s communism, which he suggests is very present in such discussions of property.","PeriodicalId":229413,"journal":{"name":"Politics, Ontology and Knowledge in Spinoza","volume":"108 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116273046","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Indignation and the Conatus of the Spinozist State","authors":"A. Matheron","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474440103.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474440103.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"Does Spinoza, like many of his contemporaries, present a social contract theory of the genesis of the State and political society? In this essay, Matheron seeks to argue that, despite some textual indications to the contrary, Spinoza’s final and unfinished political work, the Political Treatise, does in fact present an account of a non-contractual theory of the genesis of political society, one that, when interpreted correctly, actually suggests that political society is always and everywhere already constituted necessarily. Matheron thus interprets Paragraph 1 of Chapter VI and its language of naturaliter convenire to mean neither, as Hobbes would say, that humans require an artificial contract to establish political society, nor because humans naturally reason that society will be advantageous to them. On the contrary, Matheron argues that Spinoza describes a purely passional genesis of the State, one which requires appeals to neither contracts nor calculus, but requires only the internal dynamics of indignation. This, however, has the striking conclusion of there being something ‘radically evil’ in even the best constituted States.","PeriodicalId":229413,"journal":{"name":"Politics, Ontology and Knowledge in Spinoza","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130797256","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Physics and Ontology in Spinoza: The Enigmatic Response to Tschirnhaus","authors":"A. Matheron","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474440103.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474440103.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"What is Spinoza’s relationship to the mathematical physics that followed from the Galilean revolution? In this essay, Matheron reconstructs Spinoza’s response to his interlocutor, Tschirnhaus, regarding the status of the concept of extension in Spinoza’s philosophy and, in particular, its difference from Descartes’s concept of extension. But, as Maheron notes, Spinoza nonetheless encountered difficulties in his response to Tschirnhaus, namely, his need to reformulate his ontology of power by once again rewriting the opening of the Ethics as well as redefine the status of physics. The successive drafts of the Ethics show Spinoza working towards a clearer and more concise account of his ontology of power, which holds that God as absolutely infinite causal substance has the power to produce anything and everything that is conceivable without contradiction. But does it then follow that the laws of the physical universe are deducible a priori? Matheron investigates Spinoza’s attempts to address this question and concludes with a discussion of Spinoza’s relevance for more contemporary developments in science.","PeriodicalId":229413,"journal":{"name":"Politics, Ontology and Knowledge in Spinoza","volume":"62 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132579348","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Women and Servants in Spinozist Democracy","authors":"A. Matheron","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474440103.003.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474440103.003.0017","url":null,"abstract":"Was Spinoza merely a victim of the prevailing prejudices of his time when he chose to exclude women and servants from his theory of democracy? In this essay, Matheron shows that this explanation is insufficient. On the contrary, a glaring translation error has led generations of translators and interpreters to claim that Spinoza’s theory of democracy excludes servants on the basis of their ‘servile’ occupations. Matheron conclusively shows that if servants, construed broadly, appear to be excluded from democracy, it is not therefore due to the moral standing of their occupation, but because such individuals would necessarily be constrained to hold the same views as their masters for otherwise, they risk losing their means of subsistence. As for women, a similar argument applies. There is nothing essential about women that requires they be excluded from democratic participation, but rather, their exclusion is everywhere the result of men subject to passions. Men whose minds are dominated by inadequate ideas will necessarily destroy a democracy that includes women since they will compete over the attention of the most beautiful women. For Spinoza then, such exclusions appeared necessary due to the irrationality of human beings, in particular, men, dominated by the passions.","PeriodicalId":229413,"journal":{"name":"Politics, Ontology and Knowledge in Spinoza","volume":"99 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132834020","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Spinoza and Power","authors":"A. Matheron","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474440103.003.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474440103.003.0014","url":null,"abstract":"In this chapter, Matheron lays out in perhaps its most concise form the Spinozist theory of power in language that is particularly inflected with Marxist terminology. From the initial claim that God is absolute causal power, from which nothing is exempt, Matheron builds up Spinoza’s theory point by point from the perspective of an isolated individual faced with nature to our preliminary interactions with others. Matheron then shifts to the perspective of a multitude of human individuals, describing the chaotic and despotic relations of power that necessarily inhere in the ‘state of nature’ and which are subsequently transformed with the establishment of political society. The ideal political organization would be one the encourages the maximum amount of democracy. However, Spinoza is no theorist of bourgeois democracy precisely because he sees the State as the result of a relation of forces, and not the actual realisation of the ideals of ‘reason’ or ‘liberty’.","PeriodicalId":229413,"journal":{"name":"Politics, Ontology and Knowledge in Spinoza","volume":"143 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123775440","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}