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Spinozistic Selves

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2020

SAMUEL NEWLANDS
SAMUEL NEWLANDS*
Affiliation:
UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAMEsnewlands@nd.edu
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Abstract

Spinoza's Ethics promises a path for sweeping personal transformations, but his accounts face two sets of overarching problems. The first concerns his peculiar metaphysics of action and agents; the second his apparent neglect of the very category of persons. Although these are somewhat distinct concerns, they have a common, unified solution in Spinoza's system that is philosophically rich and interesting, both in its own right and in relation to contemporary work in moral philosophy. After presenting the core of the problem facing Spinoza's action theory, I turn to his overlooked account of selves, one that can be illuminated by contemporary work on so-called deep-self theories. I then show how Spinoza's distinctive account of selves prevents his action theory from collapsing into metaphysical incoherence, and conclude with an implication for Spinoza's broader account of transformation.

Keywords

Spinozaselfearly modernFrankfurtagencyaction theorymetaphysics
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the American Philosophical Association , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , Spring 2020 , pp. 16 - 35
Copyright
Copyright © American Philosophical Association 2020

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Footnotes

I thank audiences and discussion partners at the University of Washington, the Early Modern Tahoe Workshop, the Chicago Early Modern Roundtable group, and the University of Notre Dame for their insightful feedback and challenges. I am especially grateful to two anonymous referees for their perceptive questions, objections, suggestions, and exemplary response times.

All references to Spinoza's writings refer to the internal references of the Ethics by part, type, and number (e.g., Ip33), with pagination from Gebhardt's (1925) Opera (cited by volume and page as ‘G’) where necessary. All translations are based on Edwin's Curley 1985 edition, Collected Works, vol. 1.

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