University of California, San Diego
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 2000
Dunedin, Otago, New Zealand
PhilPapers Editorships
Spinoza: Ethical Theory
  •  15
    These volumes in Bloomsbury's series of studies in continental philosophy arise from the editors' and authors' conviction that a study of Spinoza's views about authority can be productive politically. The volumes include works of scholarship, then, but scholarship with a purpose beyond that of understanding Spinoza. The editors and authors take Spinoza to have enduring relevance for the criticism of and resistance to harmful power structures in society today. The essays ought to be read as works…Read more
  •  14
    Spinoza's Rules of Living
    In Yitzhak Melamed (ed.), The Young Spinoza. 2014.
    Chapter 5 addresses the provisional morality of the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (TIE). The young Spinoza proposes that even as one works at emending the intellect, one should live by certain rules, which one must assume to be good. One should accommodate ordinary ways of speaking and living to the extent that one can without compromising one’s project. One should enjoy pleasures in moderation. Finally, one should seek instrumental goods only insofar as they are necessary for heal…Read more
  •  14
    Reply to Yitzhak Melamed (review)
    The Leibniz Review 21 161-164. 2011.
  •  14
    Spinoza on Reason
    Oxford University Press. 2017.
    Michael LeBuffe explains claims about reason in Spinoza's metaphysics, theory of mind, ethics, and politics. He emphasizes the extent to which different claims build upon one another so contribute to the systematic coherence of Spinoza's philosophy.
  •  11
    Holbach
    with Emilie Gourdon
    In Graham Oppy (ed.), A Companion to Atheism and Philosophy, Wiley. 2019.
    Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach financed and contributed to Diderot's Encyclopedia. He hosted many of Europe's best minds in the eighteenth century. The first half of this chapter describes these roles with a focus on atheism in Enlightenment France. Holbach was also a prolific writer. The second half of this chapter defends an interpretation of his atheism. Holbach held that God does not exist and that the knowledge of this fact is a great benefit to those who come to have it.
  •  7
    Spinoza and Hobbes
    In Yitzhak Y. Melamed (ed.), A Companion to Spinoza, Wiley. 2021.
    The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes directly influenced and, possibly, was also influenced by Spinoza. Hobbes and Spinoza were both aware of the advanced science of mid‐seventeenth‐century Europe and of the uncomfortable fit of that science with traditional moral and religious doctrines. Spinoza defines ‘appetite’ in terms of striving and ‘desire,’ in turn, in terms of appetite. The basis for Spinoza's theory of desire in an account of causation implies that the distinction between activity an…Read more
  •  1
    The anatomy of the passions
    In Olli Koistinen (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza's Ethics, Cambridge University Press. pp. 188--222. 2009.
  • Two Types of Seventeenth Century Naturalistic Ethics
    Dissertation, University of California, San Diego. 2000.
    Whereas Spinoza's ethics is often thought to be a recasting of Hobbesian ethics, I argue that his theory of motivation is better than Hobbes's, that his theory of value is richer than Hobbes's, and that both are highly distinctive. Edwin Curley and Jonathan Bennett both attribute to Spinoza an ethical theory similar to Hobbes's: all human agents necessarily want to do whatever they think will preserve them, and anything valuable has moral value just because it is a necessary means to what agents…Read more
  • Virtue as power
    In Peter A. French (ed.), Early Modern Philosophy Reconsidered, Wiley-blackwell. 2011.
  • Dramatic changes in the understanding of nature and turbulent debates in religion marked seventeenth century moral philosophy. Many of the most important works of the century were attempts to defend new moral concepts or to recast old ones, as a way of responding to new doctrines in religion, epistemology, ad metaphysics. Many others were attempts to show that traditional conceptions of value, or elements of them, did not after all require revision. Moral concepts depend, or might be taken to de…Read more
  • This essay focuses on Spinoza’s claim that ideas of reason are necessary. While Spinoza understands necessity to imply that something cannot be otherwise, the author shows that Spinoza employs a narrower notion of necessity that applies only to some things, what LeBuffe describes as omnipresence: existing at all times and in all places. This account of the sense in which the ideas of reason are necessary makes evident that such ideas have especially strong motivational power. Our affects are mor…Read more