Nastassja Pugliese

Neste artigo-ensaio, aponto que a pesquisa sobre as obras escritas por mulheres na filosofia tem implicações práticas que interferem no nosso modo de ensinar filosofia e de vivenciar a prática filosófica acadêmica. Elaborando sobre experiências de aula recentes, pretendo mostrar que o projeto de resgate tem um cunho pedagógico na medida em que deixa explícitos vieses de interpretação histórica e fenômenos sexistas da cultura acadêmica. Finalmente, mostro que o projeto de resgate ensina que a história tem conexões profundas com o presente e que, por isso, o espaço de criação de conteúdo da sala de aula e temas de filosofia da educação tornam-se fundamentais para o projeto de ampliação do cânone filosófico.Palavras-chave: Mulheres. Filosofia. Cânone. Ensino. Pedagogia. AbstractIn this essay paper, I show that the research on the philosophical works written by women has practical implications that interfere in our way of teaching Philosophy and experiencing its academic practice. Building from recent classroom experiences, I try to show that the retrieval project has a pedagogical aspect as it makes explicit historical interpretation biases and sexist phenomena of the academic culture. Finally, I show that the retrieval project also shows that History has deep connections with the present and, for this reason, the space for content creation in philosophy classrooms and topics in philosophy of education become key for the project of expansion of the philosophical canon.Keywords: Women. Philosophy. Canon. Teaching. Pedagogy.

Although the works of the authors of the Golden Age of Latin Literature play an important formative role for Early Modern philosophers, their influence in Early Modern thought is, nowadays, rarely studied. Trying to bring this topic to light once again and following the seminal works of Kajanto (1979), Proietti (1985) and Akkerman (1985), I will target Spinoza’s Latin sources in order to analyze their place in his philosophy. On those grounds, I will offer an overview of the problems of the reception of classical literature in Early Modernity and then dwell on the particular case of Ovid and Spinoza. The present paper will argue that although Spinoza’s references to Ovid fill a rhetorical purpose as suggested by the existing literature, these mentions have a prior philosophical motivation. That is, the references in the Ethics are not merely illustrative; instead, they indicate that Spinoza acknowledges Ovid’s beliefs about human experiences and deliberately elaborates on Ovid’s view to construct and defend his own theses. To this end, the paper will analyze some citations mapped by Proietti (1985) and add a new one in an attempt to enlarge the list of places and topics that merit further investigation. To conclude, I will point out how the references to Ovid are part of Spinoza’s own defense of the powers of imagination.

In chapter IX of the Principles, Anne Conway claims that her metaphysics is diametrically opposed to those of Descartes and Spinoza. Scholars have analyzed her rejection of Cartesianism, but not her critique of Spinoza. This paper proposes that two central points of Conway’s metaphysics can be understood as direct responses to Spinoza: (1) the relation between God, Christ, and the creatures in the tripartite division of being, and (2) the individuation of beings in the lowest species. I will argue that Conway, in criticizing Spinoza’s identification between God and nature, defends a paradoxical monism, and that her concept of individuation is a reductio ad absurdum of Spinoza’s criterion of identity in the individuation of finite modes.

Imagination is characterized by Spinoza as the first kind of knowledge, and, as such, imagination is a mode of thought. However, in a further mapping of the concept in the Ethics, we see that it is an activity that involves both the mind and the extended body. The standard and idealist interpretation of imagination does not account for its corporeal or extended dimension, leaving aside an important aspect of the activity. Based on the thesis of causal independency of attributes, I will argue against the traditional interpretation and demonstrate that there is an imagination of the body in Spinoza.