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1Notes on ContributorsIn Aurelia Armstrong, Keith Green & Andrea Sangiacomo (eds.), Spinoza and Relational Autonomy: Being with Others, Eup. pp. 212-212. 2019.
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1IndexIn Aurelia Armstrong, Keith Green & Andrea Sangiacomo (eds.), Spinoza and Relational Autonomy: Being with Others, Eup. pp. 213-222. 2019.
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210Consciousness without Existence: Descartes, Severino and the Interpretation of ExperienceIn Andrea Strazzoni & Marco Sgarbi (eds.), Reading Descartes. Consciousness, Body, and Reasoning, Firenze University Press. pp. 169-198. 2023.Consciousness is connected with the fact that a subject is aware and open to the manifestation of whatever appears. Existence, by contrast, is used to express the fact that something is given in experience, is present, or is real. Usually, the two notions are taken to be somehow related. This chapter suggests that existence is at best introduced as a metaphysical (or meta-experiential) concept that inevitably escapes the domain of conscious experience. In order to illustrate this claim, two case…Read more
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16Spinoza on the Passions and the SelfIn Yitzhak Y. Melamed (ed.), A Companion to Spinoza, Wiley. 2021.In the third part of the Ethics, Spinoza provides a naturalistic picture of human psychology. Spinoza's account distinguishes between active and passive affects. This chapter discusses how Spinoza's theory of affects demonstrates that the self with which human individuals identify in daily life is the result of a complex and constantly on‐going imaginative construction shaped by desires and causal interactions with other individuals and external causes. The core of the affective field is occupie…Read more
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54The Ontology of Determination: From Descartes to SpinozaScience in Context 28 (4): 515-543. 2015.This paper argues that Spinoza's notions of “conatus” and “power of acting” are derived by means of generalization from the notions of “force of motion” and “force of determination” that Spinoza discussed in his Principles of Cartesian Philosophy to account for interactions among bodies on the basis of their degrees of contrariety. I argue that in the Ethics, Spinoza's ontology entails that interactions must always be accounted for in terms of degrees of “agreement or disagreement in nature” amo…Read more
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53Before the Conatus Doctrine: Spinoza’s Correspondence with Willem van BlijenberghArchiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 98 (2): 144-168. 2016.Name der Zeitschrift: Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie Jahrgang: 98 Heft: 2 Seiten: 144-168.
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17Do you need to know in order to act? The case for a Suárezian legacy in early modern occasionalismSouthern Journal of Philosophy 61 (3): 506-526. 2023.The goal of this article is to suggest that in early modern discussions of agency and causal efficacy it is possible to detect an attempt at pushing to its extreme consequences a specific account of agency and causality that was developed in late scholastic thought. More specifically, the article examines Francisco Suárez's (1548–1617) account of freedom and how this relates to his views on efficient causality. Despite Suárez's careful way of differentiating between natural (necessary) and human…Read more
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5Defect of Knowledge and Practice of Virtue in Geulincx’s OccasionalismStudia Leibnitiana 46 (1): 46-63. 2014.
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16Johann Christoph Sturm’s natural philosophy, with which Leibniz engages in “De ipsa natura”, as well as Petrus van Musschenbroek’s epistemology, constitute important steps in the process of the speciation of physics. In this case, speciation is understood as the process through which the explanation of natural phenomena via empirical regularities comes to define the whole domain of the newly established niche of physics, to the exclusion both of teleology and efficient causality.
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14A Spinozistic approach to relational autonomy : the case of prostitutionIn Aurelia Armstrong, Keith Green & Andrea Sangiacomo (eds.), Spinoza and Relational Autonomy: Being with Others, Eup. pp. 194-211. 2019.
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Geulincx and the Quod Nescis principle : a conservative revolutionIn Steven Nadler, Tad M. Schmaltz & Delphine Antoine-Mahut (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Descartes and Cartesianism, Oxford University Press. 2019.
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9The meaning of existence ( bhava) in the Pāli discourses of the BuddhaBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 30 (6): 931-952. 2022.This paper seeks to reconstruct the meaning of existence in the Pāli discourses of the Buddha by considering how the notion is used in the most systematic contexts in which it appears, and how it could be best interpreted. The discourses are concerned with how existence is used to support and consolidate a certain attitude of ownership, appropriation, and entitlement over contents of experience, in virtue of which one can claim that this or that is ‘mine’. The problem with this move is that it s…Read more
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30Spinoza’s Religion _Spinoza’s Religion_ , by Clare Carlisle, Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2021, 272 pp., $29.95 / £25.00(hb), ISBN 978-06-91-17659-8 (review)Intellectual History Review 33 (4): 768-771. 2023.Spinoza is one of the most famous early modern philosophers. He is known as one of the forefathers of “Radical Enlightenment”, and his attacks against anthropomorphic views of God and superstitious...
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23Mapping the evolution of early modern natural philosophy: corpus collection and authority acknowledgementAnnals of Science 79 (1): 1-39. 2022.ABSTRACT Although natural philosophy underwent dramatic transformations during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, studying its evolution as a whole remains problematic. In this paper, we present a method that integrates traditional reading and computational tools in order to distil from different resources (the four existing Dictionaries of early modern philosophers and WorldCat) a representative corpus (consisting of 2,535 titles published in Latin, French, English, and German) for mappi…Read more
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23Expanding the Corpus of Early Modern Natural Philosophy: Initial Results and a Review of Available SourcesJournal of Early Modern Studies 10 (1): 107-115. 2021.
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17Johann Christoph Sturm's Natural Philosophy: Passive Forms, Occasionalism, and Scientific ExplanationsJournal of the History of Philosophy 58 (3): 493-520. 2020.In the third intermède of Le Malade Imaginaire, Molière imagines a sort of medical convention in which "the wisest experts and professors of Medicine" examine whether a bachelor candidate can be deemed to enter the medical profession. As the first question in this examination, the "Chief physician" asks, "What is the cause and reason [causam et rationem] why opium induces sleep?" The candidate answers without the least hesitation: "Because it contains a sleeping virtue [virtus dormitiva], whose …Read more
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61Divide et Impera: Modeling the Relationship between Canonical and Noncanonical Authors in the Early Modern Natural Philosophy NetworkHopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 10 (2): 365-413. 2020.This article aims to study the relationship between today’s canonical and noncanonical authors in the domain of early modern natural philosophy through the lens of social network analysis. By studying a massive corpus of letters (Electronic Enlightenment project), we examine the structural relationship between several of today’s canonical authors in natural philosophy and noncanonical women philosophers operating in the same network. We demonstrate the structure of this network and its effects o…Read more
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33Spinoza et les problemes du corps dans l’histoire de la critique: Essai bibliographiqueJournal of Early Modern Studies 5 (2): 101-142. 2016.This bibliographical essay reconstructs the scholarly debate concerning Spinoza’s account of the body over the last ninety years. The paper focuses on the notion of body considered only from a physical point of view. Questions concerning the ontological status of bodies, the nature of their essence, their power of operating, or the sources of Spinoza’s views have originated a long-standing discussion. This reconstruction presents the main solutions developed so far, and pinpoints the still under…Read more
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42Spinoza’s Ethics: A Critical Guide ed. by Yitzhak Y. MelamedJournal of the History of Philosophy 56 (2): 373-374. 2018.This new Cambridge Critical Guide to Spinoza’s Ethics offers an extensive, thought-provoking, and up-to-date state of the scholarly conversation that surrounds one of Spinoza’s most studied masterpieces. The first six chapters address topics mostly related to parts one and two of the Ethics. Don Garrett discusses the identity of the attributes. Warren Zev Harvey suggests that Maimonides’s critique of final causes can be considered as an important source for Spinoza’s treatment of the same topic …Read more
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15Dall'origine della superstizione all'origine del movimento: lo strano caso della confutazione tolandiana di SpinozaRivista di Storia Della Filosofia 68 (4): 645-671. 2013.
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38Locke and Spinoza on the epistemic and motivational weakness of reason: the Reasonableness of Christianity and the Theological-Political TreatiseIntellectual History Review 26 (4): 477-495. 2016.
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6L’imperativo dell’eterno come morale meta-nichilistica: note per una discussione su Alberto CaraccioloActa Philosophica 22 (2): 361-376. 2013.
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35Spinoza on Reason, Passions, and the Supreme GoodOxford University Press. 2019.Andrea Sangiacomo offers a new understanding of Spinoza's moral philosophy, how his views significantly evolved over time, and how he himself struggled during his career to develop a theory that could speak to human beings as they actually are--imperfect, passionate, and often not very rational.
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35Spinoza and Relational Autonomy: Being with Others (edited book)Eup. 2019.Integrates Spinoza's thought into the contemporary debate on interpersonal relationships and individual autonomy The question of how to understand autonomy has emerged as a critical issue in contemporary political philosophy. Feminists and others argue that autonomy cannot be adequately conceived without taking into consideration the ways in which it is shaped by our relationships with others. This collection of 13 new essays shows what Baruch Spinoza can add to our understanding of the relation…Read more
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35Samuel Clarke on Agent Causation, Voluntarism, and OccasionalismScience in Context 31 (4): 421-456. 2018.ArgumentThis paper argues that Samuel Clarke's account of agent causation (i) provides a philosophical basis for moderate voluntarism, and (ii) both leads to and benefits from the acceptance of partial occasionalism as a model of causation for material beings. Clarke's account of agent causation entails that for an agent to be properly called an agent (i.e. causally efficacious), it is essential that the agent is free to choose whether to act or not. This freedom is compatible with the existence…Read more
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61Modelling the history of early modern natural philosophy: the fate of the art-nature distinction in the Dutch universitiesBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 27 (1): 46-74. 2019.The ‘model approach’ facilitates a quantitative-oriented study of conceptual changes in large corpora. This paper implements the ‘model approach’ to investigate the erosion of the traditional art-nature distinction in early modern natural philosophy. I argue that a condition for this transformation has to be located in the late scholastic conception of final causation. I design a conceptual model to capture the art-nature distinction and formulate a working hypothesis about its early modern fate…Read more
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35Spinoza's Rethinking of Activity: From the Short Treatise to the EthicsSouthern Journal of Philosophy 56 (1): 101-126. 2018.This paper argues that God's immanent causation and Spinoza's account of activity as adequate causation (of finite modes) do not always go together in Spinoza's thought. We show that there is good reason to doubt that this is the case in Spinoza's early Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well‐being. In the Short Treatise, Spinoza defends an account of God's immanent causation without fully endorsing the account of activity as adequate causation that he will later introduce in the Ethics (E3def2)…Read more
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25Marco Sgarbi, The Italian Mind. Vernacular Logic in Renaissance ItalyJournal of Early Modern Studies 4 (1): 136-140. 2015.