Seminar with Dimitris Vardoulakis (Western Sidney University, Australia) e Nicolas Lema Habash (Universidad de los Andes, Colombia)

Nicolas Lema Habash, Was Spinoza a Philosopher of Recognition? Back to the Spanish Poet

Dimitris Vardoulakis, Political Monism in Spinoza

Presented by Luigi Emilio Pischedda and Filippo Del Lucchese

Nicolas Lema Habash, Was Spinoza a Philosopher of Recognition? Back to the Spanish Poet

Abstract:

Some of the arguments put forward in Duratio vitalis. Figures et variations de la vie dans la philosophie de Spinoza (Paris, 2022) will be presented in this talk. I propose to give a double answer to the question of whether the figure of the Spanish poet has died after suffering from amnesia, according to Spinoza’s famous example given in the scholium of proposition 39 of Ethics IV. On the one hand, reading a radical discontinuity between the biography of the poet, before and after the amnesia, is in line with Spinoza’s notion of death. On the other, establishing a biographical continuity in this example may be supported by a conception of recognition Spinoza implicitly advances. I contend that both answers are coherent with Spinoza’s thought. 

Dimitris Vardoulakis, Political Monism in Spinoza

Abstract:

There are two seemingly intractable difficulties besetting Spinoza scholarship. One concerns book V of the Ethics. How is it that a radical materialist ends up celebrating the intellectual love of god, which appears to be a re-introduction of transcendence, a lapse into “talking whereof one must remain silent”? The second difficulty concerns the relation between Ethics and the Theological Political Treatise, or, which amounts to the same thing, the relation between Spinoza’s ontology and his political philosophy. The relation matters because Spinoza holds that everything is in god, substance or nature, which challenges the traditional separation of fields of philosophy, such as ontology and politics. Vardoulakis shows that Spinoza actually address the issue of the relation between the Ethics and the Treatise in a seemingly minor comment, which however, if read in its right context, sheds new light on both of the difficulties.