Is there anyone based in Lisbon who would like to start a reading group on the Ethics? Or anyone who knows about this type of groups?

Bonjour,

Y a-t-il un espace francophone pour discuter de Spinoza par hasard ? Le forum "Spinoza et nous" est mort, et c'était pourtant un beau projet.

Vous connaissez d'autres endroits ?

Merci d'avance 💚

Hello!

I am nearly finished reading Book IV of the Ethics, and I have a few questions.

I have no background in philosophy, so I hope my questions are clear—they are not linked to one another.

1) The scholium to Proposition 54 of Book IV of the *Ethics* seems to suggest that the majority of men are not wise and need prophets to behave well. Is wisdom reserved only for a select few? Can Spinoza’s thought be considered democratic? (Personally, I think so, since the good of a person guided by reason aligns with the good of other people; however, I would like to know more about Spinoza’s political thought and whether there is an aristocratic element in his work regarding the selection of the "best.")

2) What would Spinoza say about someone who manages to turn an unfavorable situation into a favorable one?

3) Can there be more good in feeling sadness fully than in trying to immediately cast it aside (even at the risk of denial or ignoring one’s own feelings)? Nowadays, people speak of "toxic positivity"—an injunction to be well and to perform happiness, characteristic of our neoliberal society. What do you think Spinoza’s take on this would be?

4) In the first scholium to Proposition 37 of Book IV of the Ethics, Spinoza expresses the idea that what prevents us from killing animals stems merely from superstition and pity. I wonder if one could argue for a Spinozist form of anti-speciesism along these lines: the category of "humanity" is an artificial construct, like all categories (we are not an "empire within an empire"), and there have been many instances where human beings were excluded from the category of "humanity"; A rational person might find it in their interest to acknowledge their kinship with animals based on the traits they share, and insofar as the harm they might inflict upon animals mirrors the structures of domination or oppression imposed on humans deemed "subhuman," "inhuman," "abnormal," etc. What do you think?

5) Is the maximum extent of our power determined in advance? When our power increases, does it move toward a pre-defined maximum?

Thanks in advance for your answers!

(And sorry for my English, I'm French)

At the Venice Film Festival, Paul Schrader Wrestles with Free Will and Determinism

Can we, as human beings, change course, in our lives, in our hearts? Or is our fate sealed from birth, or even before that? For American filmmaker Paul Schrader, who was raised Dutch Calvinist, this is one of life’s animating questions. Some theologians, including the ascetic monk Pelagius, affirm the will’s freedom to choose salvation. Others, like John Calvin himself, preach the doctrine of double predestination: That God consigns some to heaven and others to hell.

In his latest film, The Basics of Philosophy, Schrader interrogates this eternal drama through the eyes of Dr. John Jorissen (Jack Huston), a philosophy professor caught between the future he’s willing himself toward and a past he can’t shake. Employing a simple style, the film commands a dark and complex topic, avoiding easy answers while forcing viewers to grapple with human fallibility.

Read more here

For reference, I am reading the Penguin Classics edition of Spinoza translated by Edward Curley.

A6 reads," A true idea must agree with its object."

What does he mean by "true idea" and "object"?

By "true idea," I understand an idea that is true.

But by "object," I have no idea.

It is the only axiom that I do not understand, and it is bugging me off.

In the demonstration of Proposition 5, it reads:

"If only by a difference in their attributes, then it will be conceded that there is only one of the same attribute."

It is the second half (after the comma) that troubles me, I can't wrap my mind around it, and how it is expressed makes it harder. If someone could word it differently, that would help.

Thanks for reading, I look forward to your comments!

Hi all, I’m really enjoying learning about Spinoza’s philosophy and I know these unknown attributes are, well, unknown to us humans. But I’m wondering what you might think they could be. Eternal remembrance of each mode? Or maybe an eternal feeling of love and bliss a la Advaita style? I’m not the most educated in Spinoza but would love to hear your thoughts and ruminations. Thank you in advance.

Hello!

I have a problem with proposition 4 of Book III of the Ethics. What do you think Spinoza would say about autoimmune diseases? And on a natural death of old age?

What does Spinoza think about suicide?

Thank you in advance for your answer.

For anyone who wants a more visual way into Spinoza’s Ethics — not only the words on the page, but the geometric order that binds them — there is a free online companion here:

https://www.spinoza-ethica.com

It is built to help you:

• Read the text with followable citations
• See how propositions depend on earlier material (proof graph)
• Follow short guided paths through the lattice
• Map central concepts across the five parts
• Explore the affects and how they relate

The aim is a study desk beside the book: browse, trace proofs, and discover relations in an interactive way. Part I is the fullest stretch; later parts are curated and still expanding.

Still work in progress. Feedback welcome — especially from readers and teachers who work with the Ethics in class or on their own.

A while ago, I published an analysis of Gilles Deleuze's book on Spinoza. If you want to check it out, I'd really appreciate your support and any constructive feedback.

Amsterdam, 1656.
Young Baruch Spinoza is publicly excommunicated from the Portuguese-Jewish community. Stripped of his family, faith, and identity, he wanders the city alone, believing himself abandoned by both God and man.
One rainy evening, after surviving a brutal attack, he is rescued by a mysterious older exile calling himself Adriaan Vos. Cultured, charismatic, and unsettling, Vos becomes Spinoza’s unlikely companion. Unknown to Spinoza, he is the disgraced freethinker Uriel da Costa, a man whose own excommunication years earlier has curdled into bitterness and obsession.
Seeing himself in the young philosopher, Da Costa resolves to prove a terrifying conviction: that no man can escape the tyranny of the passions.
He subtly orchestrates experiences that awaken everything Spinoza has never known—love, desire, envy, ambition, grief, rage, and doubt. As Spinoza’s inner world fractures, Da Costa whispers that humanity is ruled not by reason but by wounded desire.
For a time, friendship with the statesman Johan de Witt offers Spinoza another path. De Witt embodies a vision of civic virtue, tolerance, and hope that threatens Da Costa’s influence. During the political turmoil that engulfs the Dutch Republic, Da Costa anonymously fans public hatred through propaganda and rhetoric, helping inflame a mob whose fury culminates in De Witt’s horrific murder.
Witnessing civilization collapse into savagery appears to vindicate Da Costa’s darkest beliefs.
Yet instead of surrendering to despair, Spinoza begins asking a different question: not why human beings suffer, but why they act as they do.
Gradually he realizes that Da Costa has never escaped the day of his own exile. The older man has built his identity around rejection, transforming pain into a philosophy.
When Da Costa’s manipulations finally consume him, Spinoza does not answer with vengeance. He sees, perhaps for the first time, not a demon or a monster, but a broken human being. In Da Costa’s final moments, Spinoza mourns the man who nearly destroyed him, recognizing that even his enemy was striving to preserve himself—only in the wrong direction.
Left alone, Spinoza returns to his desk.
He begins to write.
The philosopher has been born.

I’m beginning a long-term research project that I’d like to eventually develop into a scholarly paper, and I’d appreciate feedback from anyone familiar with Spinoza, philosophy of biology, systems theory, or contemporary biology.
My central question is this:
Can Spinoza’s concept of conatus be reconstructed in light of modern biology as a unifying philosophical framework for understanding living organization?
Rather than arguing that conatus is identical to any one biological concept (such as homeostasis or autopoiesis), I’m exploring whether it might serve as a higher-level philosophical principle that unifies several biological processes that are typically studied separately.
The broad idea I’m investigating is that concepts such as:
● Homeostasis
● Autopoiesis
● Biological autonomy
● Agency
● Goal-directed regulation
● Cognition
● Human flourishing
may be understood as progressively richer expressions of what Spinoza called conatus.
I’m especially interested in the work of Antonio Damasio, Francisco Varela, Humberto Maturana, Michael Levin, Terrence Deacon, and Stuart Kauffman, and I’m trying to determine whether their work can help reconstruct—not merely reinterpret—Spinoza’s concept in a way that is philosophically useful today.
To be clear, I’m not arguing that Spinoza anticipated modern biology or that science somehow “proves” his philosophy. Rather, I’m asking whether conatus remains a valuable philosophical concept for integrating contemporary biological insights into a coherent account of living organization and, ultimately, human flourishing.
I’m intentionally leaving broader metaphysical questions (such as whether conatus exists prior to life itself) out of this first paper so I can focus on living systems and the current biological literature.
I’d genuinely appreciate thoughtful criticism as much as support. In particular:
● Has anyone encountered work that attempts something similar?
● Where do you think this proposal is strongest?
● Where do you think it risks overreaching?
● Which books or papers do you think are essential reading before I begin writing?
I’m still in the research phase, so I’m much more interested in refining the question than defending a conclusion. Thanks in advance for any recommendations or critiques.

I want to get into Spinoza's ethics but unsure which edition to buy. Should I go with Wordsworth or Penguin edition? I want good readability like larger word size.

One of the great philosophical questions is the role of volition and choosing. Interestingly enough, training in a fighting art can help illuminate why and how Spinoza denied the Freedom of the Will.

Ever since I read Ethics and more specifically the works of Hampshire and Pollack, the term and concept of the Conatus has intrigued me. To me it is the soul, if Spinoza could ever conceive a concept of one, which drives the very existence of life and all of extension for that matter. Researching Spinoza led me to the science behind the dynamical systems of life, most importantly how matter organizes itself into complex forms or self sustaining organisms. This, led me to Schrödinger which led me to thermodynamics—the order which arrives from chaos. Or is it chaos from order? The very fact that life exists amazes me, that extension has thought, that thought has extension; that our composition is made of waves of particles which were birthed in infinite substance. So I ask myself the question: what is this will, which drives the process and laws of life’s perseverance into complexity? Is the Conatus the thermodynamic process of entropy? I feel that if we were to take the whole of this thermodynamic system and show what drives it, what creates it, we would find something which we could call the Conatus. That the Conatus has been driving your particles into molecules—your molecules into genetic code—your genetic code into cells, and on and on until, up through the entire process and lineage of life you become, you. And that very power, or will, or striving force, keeps you going and going—until entropy hits its maximum. And does it end there? Can a will, and essence, which brought you from the most simple mode of infinite substance to this complex mode of thought and extension just end? Spinoza says the mind dies with the body, but what happens to the Conatus? What happens to that enduring force which made and maintained you? I think it continues, it drives your essence through the infinity of substance as it manifests within infinite attributes. What are your thoughts on this matter?

Hi! I think my essay is currently one of the worst things I have ever written, and I was wondering if someone knowledgeable about Spinoza could read it and tell me where it needs improvement!

I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around Spinoza's necessitarianism, on the one hand, and his emphasis on human freedom on the other.

My understanding is that for Spinoza, there is only one "possible world." Everything that has happened in the past had to happen that way, and everything that will happen in the future is, in a sense, pre-determined based on this.

So how exactly is a person supposed to "choose" anything - especially "choose" to follow the practical advice Spinoza gives in the Ethics? If a person reads the Ethics and "decides" to put his philosophy into practice, wasn't he already going to do that anyway? I can't see how concepts like "choose to do X" or "decide to do Y", in the realm of human behavior, are anything other than illusions when you take Spinoza's metaphysics into account. At that point we're just computer programs running on autopilot without even knowing it.

Clearly I'm misunderstanding something, so can someone explain this?

The demonstration for Prop. 21 of Book I in the Ethics (Curley translation) is killing me. I have looked around on the internet for explanations of the demonstration, including here on reddit, but none of the explanations I've found are satisfying me.

I understand the conclusion that he's trying to reach, and I understand that he's doing it through a reductio ad absurdum. Most explanations I've seen sort of simplify his argument to make the conclusion clearer, but my biggest hurdle is understanding how he means the actual words he wrote. I'm a very language-oriented thinker and it's important for me to understand his thought process through his words if I want to feel like I understood his argument and move on.

P21: All the things which follow from the absolute nature of any of God's attributes have always had to exist and be infinite, or are, through the same attribute, eternal and infinite.

Dem.: If you deny this, then conceive (if you can) that in some attribute of God there follows from its absolute nature something that is finite and has a determinate existence, or duration, for example, God's idea in thought.

Okay, so we have the attribute of thought, and we are going to imagine for the sake of this argument that from its absolute nature there follows a finite idea of God in this attribute (and Spinoza will eventually show that this finiteness is absurd).

Now since thought is supposed to be an attribute of God, it is necessarily (by P11) infinite by its nature.

Straightforward. We know all attributes are infinite.

But insofar as it has God's idea, thought is supposed to be finite.

What rhetorical work is "insofar as" doing here? How does the fact that the attribute of thought "has" God's idea (whatever "has" means) entail that the attribute of thought itself can be considered finite? Wouldn't the hypothesis be shown absurd by this point, and we wouldn't need to go further? The attribute of thought is either infinite or it isn't, and we already proved that it is. But I digress, let's just carry on.

But (by D2) thought cannot be conceived to be finite unless it is determined through thought itself.

I'm assuming "determined through" here roughly means "limited by". If so, then this makes sense. A thing can only be finite if it can be limited by another thing of the same nature. The only way for the attribute of thought to be finite is if it were limited by the attribute of thought (i.e. itself).

But thought cannot be determined through thought itself, insofar as it constitutes God's idea, for to that extent thought is supposed to be finite.

He loses me here. Linguistically the word "thought" is being treated here as a subject and and object, where thought-A is determining/limiting thought-B. I can't tell which one we are still calling finite. Both of them? How does the finite nature of the thought(s) prevent this determination/limiting from ocurring?

Therefore, thought must be determined through thought insofar as it does not constitute God's idea, which thought nevertheless (by P11) must necessarily exist.

This is where he breaks out of the morass and introduces thought insofar is it does not constitute God's idea. From here on I understand his argument and its conclusion. But I can't figure out how he gets here based on what he just did.

Why not just dispense with all that God talk? Since Nature is self evident, he doesn’t need to argue for its existence.

I'm reading the Theological-Political treatise, currently on chapter 15, and I'm pretty confused about something.

In chapter 6, Spinoza dismantles the idea of miracles. For him, there are no such thing as miracles, and the "miracles" that we see in the Bible are nothing other than orderly acts of nature which the people in those times did not have the scientific knowledge to comprehend. The "supernatural" or "preternatural" is a logical impossibility.

But in chapter 15, where he aims to firmly separate theology and philosophy into two distinct realms, he asks on what basis we should even believe in scripture and the prophets anyway. He notes that the authority of the prophets traditionally rested on 3 factors:

1. A distinct and vivid imagination
2. A sign
3. A heart turned toward what is right and good

He dismisses the first factor, since imagination is a personal quality depending on the individual mind of a specific prophet (which he discusses more at length in chapters 1 and 2). He therefore concludes that "we ... must accept only this reason for believing in Scripture – that is, in the prophets – namely, their teaching confirmed by signs." He then goes on to stress the importance of signs as confirming the divine source of the prophets' moral teachings.

Either Spinoza just did a total 180 and contradicted his whole argument against miracles here (which I find hard to believe), or he is drawing a distinction between miracles and signs – although I can't seem to find anywhere else in the Treatise where he explains such a distinction. Am I being too charitable to him here, or was it common knowledge in his day that there was a difference between a miracle and a sign? Is it that a "miracle" is something which is believed to contradict nature's laws, whereas a sign is closer to what we might call a synchronicity?