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Understanding Human Freedom in a Naturalistic Context: A Spinozistic StudyDissertation, Vanderbilt University. 1981.When contemporary naturalistically-minded philosophers think about human freedom, they are apt to get lost in more and more intricate analyses of the phrase "could have done otherwise." In this we see a severe narrowing of the issue and perhaps an inability to know what more might be involved in the issue of human freedom when man is viewed in a naturalistic light. The purpose of the dissertation is to mine the insights of Spinoza in the attempt to recapture a richer and more promising notion of…Read more
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Freedom from resentment: Spinoza's way with the reactive attitudesIn Ursula Goldenbaum & Christopher Kluz (eds.), Doing Without Free Will: Spinoza and Contemporary Moral Problems, Lexington Books. 2015.
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21The recently published Cambridge Companion to Spinoza contains a fine essay by Pierre- Francois Moreau on Spinoza’s reception and on his influence during the more than three hundred years that have passed since his death. In Moreau’s twenty-five page article we find a brief paragraph on the novelist George Eliot and half a sentence on Ed Curley. There is not another mention, at all, of any other philosopher from an English-speaking land since the seventeenth century – nothing on how Spinoz…Read more
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Spinozas Theorie des Menschen (review)Studia Spinozana: An International and Interdisciplinary Series 13 306-308. 1997.
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16Self-Knowledge as Self-Preservation?In Marjorie Grene & Debra Nails (eds.), Spinoza And The Sciences, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 191--210. 1986.
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LERMOND: "The form of man" (review)Studia Spinozana: An International and Interdisciplinary Series 4 (n/a): 415. 1988.
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127Spinozistic Themes in Bernard Malamud's The FixerStudia Spinozana: An International and Interdisciplinary Series 5. 1989."No, your honor. I didn't know who or what he was when I first came across the book -- they don't exactly love him in the synagogue, if you've read the story of his life. I found it in a junkyard in a nearby town, paid a kopek, and left cursing myself for wasting money hard to come by. Later I read through a few pages and kept on going as though there were a whirlwind at my back. As I say, I didn't understand every word but when you're dealing with such ideas you feel as though you were taking a…Read more
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127Leibniz und Das judentum (review)Journal of the History of Philosophy 49 (3): 378-379. 2011.Review of Daniel Cook, Hartmut Rudolph, and Christoph Schulte, editors. _Leibniz und das Judentum_. Studia Leibnitiana Sonderhefte, 34. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2008. Pp. 283.
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4Spinoza and the plasticity of mindStudia Spinozana: An International and Interdisciplinary Series 14 111-136. 1998.
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213Did Spinoza lie to his landlady?Studia Spinozana: An International and Interdisciplinary Series 11 15-38. 1995.According to Colerus, Spinoza replied affirmatively when his landlady asked if she "...could be saved in her faith." This paper asks what Spinoza could have meant -- and what his landlady would have thought he meant. She was asking about salvation of a certain kind -- a kind that Spinoza did not in fact believe to be possible. When he talks about salvation in his writings, he has in mind a different kind of salvation -- one that his landlady will certainly not achieve "in her faith." So, whe…Read more
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328Göttliche Gedanken. Zur Metaphysik der Erkenntnis bei Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza und LeibnizJournal of the History of Philosophy 49 (4): 495-496. 2011.In Göttliche Gedanken (Godly Thoughts), Andreas Schmidt provides an in-depth discussion of the metaphysics of knowledge and of mind in four early-modern rationalists: Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, and Leibniz. His topic overlaps with what is called “philosophy of mind” in contemporary Anglo-American circles, for he is quite interested in the relation between mind and body in these four historical thinkers. But as Schmidt effectively reminds us, the “mind-body problem” looks entirely different…Read more
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180Deciding to Believe Without Self-DeceptionJournal of Philosophy 84 (8): 441-446. 1987.Williams, Elster and Pears hold that an effort to induce in oneself a belief in the truth of some proposition that one believes to be false can succeed only if one manages, somewhere along the way, to forget that one is engaged in such an effort. Although this view has strong intuitive appeal, it is false, and in this paper it is shown to be false by example.
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49Spinoza shared with his contemporaries the conviction that the passions are, on the whole, unruly and destructive. A life of virtue requires that the passions be controlled, if not entirely vanquished, and the preferred means of imposing this control over the passions is via the power of reason. But there was little agreement in the seventeenth century about just what gives reason its strength and how its power can be brought to bear upon the wayward passions.
Winter Park, Florida, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Applied Ethics |
Philosophy of Mind |