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1284God-Intoxicated Man: The Philosopher who denied the WorldTLS: The Times Literary Supplement. 2020.
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271La Metafisica di Spinoza: Sostanza e PensieroMimesis Edizioni. 2020.This is an Italian translation of Spinoza's Metaphysics: Substance and Thought (Oxford UP, 2013).
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1098Spinoza on Causa SuiIn Yitzhak Y. Melamed (ed.), Blackwell Companion to Spinoza, Blackwell. pp. 116-125. 2021.The very first line of Spinoza’s magnum opus, the Ethics, states the following surprising definition: By cause of itself I understand that whose essence involves existence, or that whose nature cannot be conceived except as existing [Per causam sui intelligo id, cujus essentia involvit existentiam, sive id, cujus natura non potest concipi, nisi existens]. As we shall shortly see, for many of Spinoza’s contemporaries and predecessors the very notion of causa sui was utterly absurd, akin to a Ba…Read more
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332Spinoza and the Election of the HebrewsIn Michael A. Rosenthal (ed.), Spinoza & Modern Jewish Philosophy, Palgrave. forthcoming.Spinoza’s interpretation of the election of the Hebrews in the third chapter of the Theological Political Treatise enraged quite a few Jewish readers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The rise of nationalism, and the demand of loyalty to one’s own genos brought about a certain style of patriotic writing aimed at Spinoza’s “betrayal.” In a series of lectures on the eve of the Great War, Hermann Cohen portrayed Spinoza as a person of “demonic spirt” and as “the great enemy who emerged fro…Read more
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258Review of Don Garrett, Necessity and Nature in Spinoza (Oxford University Press, 2018). The Philosophical Review 129 (2020). (review)Philosophical Review 129 (3): 469-473. 2020.
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479Maimon’s ‘Law of Determinability’ and the Impossibility of Shared AttributesRevue de Métaphysique et de Morale 109 (1): 49-62. 2021.Apart from his critique of Kant, Maimon’s significance for the history of philosophy lies in his crucial role in the rediscovery of Spinoza by the German Idealists. Specifically, Maimon initiated a change from the common eighteenth-century view of Spinoza as the great ‘atheist’ to the view of Spinoza as an ‘acosmist’, i.e., a thinker who propounded a deep, though unorthodox, religious view denying the reality of the world and taking God to be the only real being. I have discussed this aspect of…Read more
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695Spinoza’s Metaphysics of SubstancePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 78 (1): 17-82. 2008.In his groundbreaking work of 1969, Spinoza's Metaphysics: An Essay in Interpretation, Edwin Curley attacked the traditional understanding of the substance-mode relation in Spinoza, which makes modes inhere in the substance. Curley argued that such an interpretation generates insurmountable problems, as had been already claimed by Pierre Bayle in his famous entry on Spinoza. Instead of having the modes inhere in the substance Curley suggested that the modes’ dependence upon the substance should…Read more
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258The Metaphysics of Substance and the Metaphysics of Thought in SpinozaDissertation, Yale University. 2005.
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798Spinoza and the Kabbalah: From the Gate of Heaven to the ‘Field of Holy Apples’In Cristina Cisiu (ed.), Early Modern Philosophy & the Kabbalah, . forthcoming.In the first part of this paper we will consider the likely extent of Spinoza’s exposure to Kabbalistic literature as he was growing up in Amsterdam. In the second part we will closely study several texts in which Spinoza seems to engage with Kabbalistic doctrines. In the third and final part we will study the role of the two crucial doctrines of emanation and pantheism (or panentheism), in Spinoza’s system and in the Kabbalistic literature.
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437“Spinoza on the Value of Humanity”In Nandi Theunissen (ed.), Re-Evaluating the Value of Humanity., Oxford University Press. pp. 74-96. 2023.Spinoza is a hardcore realist about the nature of human beings and their desires, ambitions, and delusions. But he is neither a misanthrope nor in the business of glorifying the notion of a primal and innocent non-human nature. As he writes: Let the Satirists laugh as much as they like at human affairs, let the Theologians curse them, let Melancholics praise as much as they can a life that is uncultivated and wild, let them disdain men and admire the lower animals. Men still find from experie…Read more
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429Spinoza's Political Treatise: A Critical Guide (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2017.Spinoza's Political Treatise constitutes the very last stage in the development of his thought, as he left the manuscript incomplete at the time of his death in 1677. On several crucial issues - for example, the new conception of the 'free multitude' - the work goes well beyond his Theological Political Treatise, and arguably presents ideas that were not fully developed even in his Ethics. This volume of newly commissioned essays on the Political Treatise is the first collection in English to be…Read more
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488Does Eternity Have A Future?The Philosophers' Magazine 81 40-44. 2018.Metaphysics as an independent discipline has a surprisingly short history. Until the early eighteenth century, many, perhaps even most, writers on “metaphysics” primarily had the eponymous work of Aristotle in mind. In the writings of the early eighteenth-century German rationalists—Christian Wolff and Alexander Baumgarten—we find a conception of metaphysics that is no longer necessarily tied to Aristotle’s great work. But metaphysics as a discipline was not blessed with longevity, as a dozen ye…Read more
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18Book ReviewsSteven Nadler,. Spinoza’s “Ethics”: An Introduction.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xvii+281. $28.99 (review)Ethics 117 (3): 563-565. 2007.
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47The Influence of Abraham Cohen de Herrera's Kabbalah on Spinoza's Metaphysics by Miquel BeltrànJournal of the History of Philosophy 55 (3): 544-545. 2017.Addressing the alleged "great secrets" contained in Scripture, Spinoza wrote in the Theological Political Treatise : "I have also read, and for that matter, known personally, certain Kabbalistic triflers. I've never been able to be sufficiently amazed by their madness". Were these words Spinoza's only reference to the Kabbalah, we would hardly have any reason to believe that his attitude toward the Kabbalistic literature was anything but dismissive. However, in a 1675 letter to Henry Oldenburg, …Read more
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469Spinoza and Dutch Cartesianism: Philosophy and Theology, by Alexander X. Douglas (review)Mind 126 (504): 1244-1251. 2017._ Spinoza and Dutch Cartesianism: Philosophy and Theology _, by DouglasAlexander X.. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. viii + 184.
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1214“Spinoza’s Metaphysics of Substance”In Garrett Don (ed.), Don Garrett (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza. 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming., Cambridge Up. pp. 61-112. 2021.‘Substance’ (substantia, zelfstandigheid) is a key term of Spinoza’s philosophy. Like almost all of Spinoza’s philosophical vocabulary, Spinoza did not invent this term, which has a long history that can be traced back at least to Aristotle. Yet, Spinoza radicalized the traditional notion of substance and made a very powerful use of it by demonstrating – or at least attempting to demonstrate -- that there is only one, unique substance -- God (or Nature) -- and that all other things are merely mo…Read more
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10Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity, by MichaelMack. London: Continuum, 2011, viii + 222 pp. ISBN 9781441118721 pb £19.99 (review)European Journal of Philosophy 21 (S1): 1-2. 2013.
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80Divine Teaching and the Way of the World: A Defense of Revealed ReligionPhilosophical Review 125 (1): 151-154. 2016.
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1010"Spinoza's Metaphysics and His Relationship to Hegel and the German Idealists"An Interview with Richard Marshall. 3:AM Magazine. 2017.
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1198Hegel, Spinoza, and McTaggart on the Reality of TimeInternationales Jahrbuch des Deutschen Idealismus / International Yearbook of German Idealism 14 211-234. 2016.In this paper, I study one aspect of the philosophical encounter between Spinoza and Hegel: the question of the reality of time. The precise reconstruction of the debate will require a close examination of Spinoza's concept of tempus (time) and duratio (duration), and Hegel's understanding of these notions. Following a presentation of Hegel's perception of Spinoza as a modern Eleatic, who denies the reality of time, change and plurality, I turn, in the second part, to look closely at Spinoza's …Read more
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535The First Draft of Spinoza's EthicsIn Jack Stetter & Charles Ramond (eds.), Spinoza in Twenty-First-Century American and French Philosophy: Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind, Moral and Political Philosophy, Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 93-112. 2019.The two manuscripts of the Korte Verhanedling that were discovered in the mid-nineteenth century contain two appendices. These appendices are even more enigmatic than the KV itself, and it is the first appendix that is the subject of this study. Unfortunately, there are very few studies of this text, and its precise nature seems to be still in question after more than a century and a half of scholarship. It is commonly assumed that the appendices were written after the body of the KV and I am…Read more
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1548Cohen, Spinoza, and the Nature of PantheismJewish Studies Quarterly 171-180. 2018.The German text of Cohen’s Spinoza on State & Religion, Judaism & Christianity (Spinoza über Staat und Religion, Judentum und Christentum) first appeared in 1915 in the Jahrbuch für jüdische Geschichte und Literatur. Two years before, in the winter of 1913, Cohen taught a class and a seminar on Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums. This was Cohen’s first semester at the Hochschule, after retiring from more than thirty years of teaching at …Read more
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296“When having too much Power is Harmful? - Spinoza on Political Luck”In Yitzhak Y. Melamed & Hasana Sharp (eds.), Spinoza's Political Treatise: A Critical Guide, Cambridge University Press. pp. 161-174. 2017.Spinoza’s celebrated doctrine of the conatus asserts that “each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being” (E3p6). Shortly thereafter Spinoza makes the further claim that the (human) mind strives to increase its power of acting (E3p12). This latter claim is commonly interpreted as asserting that human beings (and their associations) not only strive to persevere in their existence, but also always strive to increase their power. Spinoza’s justification for E3p12 …Read more
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362“Spinoza’s Metaphysics of Substance” in Don Garrett (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza. 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.In Garrett Don (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza. 2nd edition, Cambriddge University Press. forthcoming.‘Substance’ (substantia, zelfstandigheid) is a key term of Spinoza’s philosophy. Like almost all of Spinoza’s philosophical vocabulary, Spinoza did not invent this term, which has a long history that can be traced back at least to Aristotle. Yet, Spinoza radicalized the traditional notion of substance and made a very powerful use of it by demonstrating – or at least attempting to demonstrate -- that there is only one, unique substance -- God (or Nature) -- and that all other things are merely mo…Read more
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521“A Substance Consisting of an Infinity of Attributes”: Spinoza on the Infinity of AttributesIn Nachtomy Ohad & Winegar Reed (eds.), Infinity in Early Modern Philosophy, Springer. pp. 63-75. 2018.Though Spinoza's definition of God at the beginning of the Ethics unequivocally asserts that God has infinitely many attributes, the reader of the Ethics will find only two of these attributes discussed in any detail in Parts Two through Five of the book. Addressing this intriguing gap between the infinity of attributes asserted in E1d6 and the discussion merely of the two attributes of Extension and Thought in the rest of the book, Jonathan Bennett writes: Spinoza seems to imply that there ar…Read more
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640““Deus sive Vernunft: Schelling’s Transformation of Spinoza’s God”In G. Anthony Bruno (ed.), Schelling’s Philosophy: Freedom, Nature, and Systematicity, Oxford University Press. pp. 93-115. 2020.On 6 January 1795, the twenty-year-old Schelling—still a student at the Tübinger Stift—wrote to his friend and former roommate, Hegel: “Now I am working on an Ethics à la Spinoza. It is designed to establish the highest principles of all philosophy, in which theoretical and practical reason are united”. A month later, he announced in another letter to Hegel: “I have become a Spinozist! Don’t be astonished. You will soon hear how”. At this period in his philosophical development, Schelling had be…Read more
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342Radical protestantism in Spinoza's thought (review)Journal of the History of Philosophy 45 (2): 333-334. 2007.Yitzhak Y. Melamed - Radical Protestantism in Spinoza's Thought - Journal of the History of Philosophy 45:2 Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.2 333-334 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Yitzhak Y. Melamed University of Chicago Graeme Hunter. Radical Protestantism in Spinoza's Thought. Aldershot, UK–Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005. Pp. vii + 196. Cloth, $89.95. If this book's announced and modest aim—"to present the Christian dimension of Spinoza's thought positively and …Read more
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19th Century Philosophy |
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