Nietzsche - Heir to Spinoza
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Averroes's Dialectic of Enlightenment
59 AVERROES'S DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT. SOME DIFFICULTIES IN THE CONCEPT OF REASON Hubert Dethier A. The Unity ofthe Intellect This theory of Averroes is to be combated during the Middle ages as one of the greatest heresies (cft. Thomas's De unitate intellectus contra Averroystas); it was active with the revolutionary Baptists and Thomas M"Unzer (as Pinkstergeest "hoch liber alIen Zerstreuungen der Geschlechter und des Glaubens" 64), but also in the "AufkHinmg". It remains unclear on quite a few points 65. As far as the different phases of the epistemological process is concerned, Averroes reputes Avicenna's innovation: the vis estimativa, as being unaristotelian, and returns to the traditional three levels: senses, imagination and cognition. As far as the actual abstraction process is concerned, one can distinguish the following elements with Avicenna. 1. The intelligible fonns (intentiones in the Latin translation) are present in aptitude and in imaginative capacity, that is, in the sensory images which are present there; 2. The fonns are actualised by the working of the Active Intellect (the lowest celestial sphere), that works in analogy to light ; 3. The intelligible fonns-in-act are "received" by the "possible" or the "material intellecf', which thereby changes into intellect-in-act, also called: habitual or acquired intellect: the. perfect form ofwhich - when all scientific knowledge that can be acquired, has been acquired -is called speculative intellect. 4. According to the Aristotelian principle that the epistemological process and knowing itselfcoincide, the state ofintellect-in-act implies - certainly as speculative intellect - the conjunction with the Active Intellect. 64 Cited by Ernst Bloch, Avicenna und die Aristotelische Linke, (1953), in Suhrkamp, Gesamtausgabe, 7, p. -
The Shortcomings of a Concept Inertia and Conatus in the Philosophy of Spinoza
http://dx.doi.org/10.18778/8142-286-4.36 Alexandre Rouette Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, Canada THE SHORTCOMINGS OF A CONCEPT INERTIA AND CONATUS IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPINOZA n the third part of the Ethics, Spinoza express the desire to talk about “human actions and appetites just as if it were a question of lines, planes, and bodies” (E3, Appendix).1 With this sentence, it seems clear that Spinoza sides with Hobbes and Descartes and that he wants to con- struct a mechanistic theory of the affects. In the same part of the Ethics, Spinoza also introduces the concept of conatus: “Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being” (E3P6), Spinoza says. One will immedi- ately understand this concept of conatus as the core concept of his mechanistic theory of the affects, the concept without which this mechanistic account of the affects would be impossible. However, in the second part of the Ethics, there is another concept that could have accomplished that same goal, namely, the principle of inertia. In the words of Spinoza, “A body which moves or is at rest must be determined to motion or rest by another body, which has also been determined to motion or rest by another, and that again by another, and so on, to infinity” (E2L3). Inter- estingly enough, in the philosophy of Hobbes, the concept of endeavour/conatus is much nearer to the Spinozistic principle of inertia in its meaning than it is to the Spinozistic version of the conatus. -
SPINOZA's ETHICS: FREEDOM and DETERMINISM by Alfredo Lucero
SPINOZA’S ETHICS: FREEDOM AND DETERMINISM by Alfredo Lucero-Montaño 1. What remains alive of a philosopher's thought are the realities that concern him, the problems that he addresses, as well as the questions that he poses. The breath and depth of a philosopher's thought is what continues to excite and incite today. However, his answers are limited to his time and circumstances, and these are subject to the historical evolution of thought, yet his principal commitments are based on the problems and questions with which he is concerned. And this is what resounds of a philosopher's thought, which we can theoretically and practically adopt and adapt. Spinoza is immersed in a time of reforms, and he is a revolutionary and a reformer himself. The reforming trend in modern philosophy is expressed in an eminent way by Descartes' philosophy. Descartes, the great restorer of science and metaphysics, had left unfinished the task of a new foundation of ethics. Spinoza was thus faced with this enterprise. But he couldn't carry it out without the conviction of the importance of the ethical problems or that ethics is involved in a fundamental aspect of existence: the moral destiny of man. Spinoza's Ethics[1] is based on a theory of man or, more precisely, on an ontology of man. Ethics is, for him, ontology. He does not approach the problems of morality — the nature of good and evil, why and wherefore of human life — if it is not on the basis of a conception of man's being-in-itself, to wit, that the moral existence of man can only be explained by its own condition. -
Descartes' Optics
Descartes’ Optics Jeffrey K. McDonough Descartes’ work on optics spanned his entire career and represents a fascinating area of inquiry. His interest in the study of light is already on display in an intriguing study of refraction from his early notebook, known as the Cogitationes privatae, dating from 1619 to 1621 (AT X 242-3). Optics figures centrally in Descartes’ The World, or Treatise on Light, written between 1629 and 1633, as well as, of course, in his Dioptrics published in 1637. It also, however, plays important roles in the three essays published together with the Dioptrics, namely, the Discourse on Method, the Geometry, and the Meteorology, and many of Descartes’ conclusions concerning light from these earlier works persist with little substantive modification into the Principles of Philosophy published in 1644. In what follows, we will look in a brief and general way at Descartes’ understanding of light, his derivations of the two central laws of geometrical optics, and a sampling of the optical phenomena he sought to explain. We will conclude by noting a few of the many ways in which Descartes’ efforts in optics prompted – both through agreement and dissent – further developments in the history of optics. Descartes was a famously systematic philosopher and his thinking about optics is deeply enmeshed with his more general mechanistic physics and cosmology. In the sixth chapter of The Treatise on Light, he asks his readers to imagine a new world “very easy to know, but nevertheless similar to ours” consisting of an indefinite space filled everywhere with “real, perfectly solid” matter, divisible “into as many parts and shapes as we can imagine” (AT XI ix; G 21, fn 40) (AT XI 33-34; G 22-23). -
Reading Plato (After Nietzsche & Co.) DAVID FARRELL KRELL Depaul
Plato Nietzsche & Reading (After Co.) DAVID FARRELL KRELL DePaul University Just for the record: Socrates stands so close to me that I am almost always fighting a battle with him. Friedrich Nietzsche, 1875 ["However, I believe that Plato was sick"]. Plato, Phaedo 59b10 Nietzsche and Plato: a frightful confrontation. From the many discussions of Plato in Nietzsche's works-there are well over five hundred direct references-we learn that Nietzsche viewed his life's task as overcoming Platonism. And, all reservations and qualifications aside, we know that Plato had something to do with Platonism. If the history of Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato, if philosophy itself consists of variations on the theme of Platonism, then Nietzsche wants to write the last variation, the one that will exhaust all remaining possibilities for Platonism and bring philosophy as such to a close. It seems we can read sympathetically either Plato or Nietzsche, but not both: read Plato alone, and rest assured that Nietzsche is a dogmatist of the nastiest sort, more destructive even than Thrasymachus or Callicles; read Nietzsche alone, and rest assured that Plato is a decadent of the most contemptible sort, and a charlatan besides. Nietzsche calls him "a grand Cagliostro." Reading Plato after Nietzsche: is that possible at all?' It would not be too much to say that every indictment in the Nietzschean oeuvre of otherworldly metaphysics, morals, religion, and art directly involves Plato and Platonism. Philosophers are people who 46 want to hurry up and die, we read in Phaedo, so that they can float up to the ethereal realm of the pure ideas; to this end they despise the body and preach crusades against it, and lending death a hand, they mortify the flesh; they invent a God as anemic as themselves and invest their wretched hopes in him, dreaming heavenly dreams; even their music is lugubrious and bathetic, their dance a kind of solemn mummery. -
The Practical Origins of Ideas
The Practical Origins of Ideas Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering MATTHIEU QUELOZ Under contract with Oxford University Press Abstract Why did such highly abstract ideas as truth, knowledge, or justice become so important to us? What was the practical point of coming to think in these terms? This book uncovers, develops, and defends a philosophical method that aims to answer such questions. This is the method of pragmatic genealogy: the telling of developmental narratives that seek to make sense of ideas in terms of their practical origins. Two principal theses structure the book. The first is that there is a pragmatic genealogical tradition which cuts across the analytic-continental divide, a tradition running from the state-of-nature stories of David Hume and the early genealogies of Friedrich Nietzsche to more recent work in analytic philosophy by Edward Craig, Bernard Williams, and Miranda Fricker. However, these genealogies combine fictionalising and historicising in ways that even those sympathetic to genealogy have found puzzling. Hence the book’s second, systematic thesis: we understand why both the fictionalising and the historicising are called for if we interpret these genealogies as dynamic models serving to reverse-engineer the points of ideas in relation to generic and socio-historically local needs. Pragmatic genealogy then emerges as having two attractive features. Far from issuing in the kind of reductively instrumental view of things often associated with naturalism, pragmatism, and genealogy, the method offers us explanation without reduction, helping us understand what led our ideas to shed the traces of their practical origins. And far from being normatively inert in the way that genealogical explanations are commonly taken to be, pragmatic genealogy can affect the space of reasons by helping us determine whether and when our ideas are worth having. -
What Was the Cause of Nietzsche's Dementia?
PATIENTS What was the cause of Nietzsche’s dementia? Leonard Sax Summary: Many scholars have argued that Nietzsche’s dementia was caused by syphilis. A careful review of the evidence suggests that this consensus is probably incorrect. The syphilis hypothesis is not compatible with most of the evidence available. Other hypotheses – such as slowly growing right-sided retro-orbital meningioma – provide a more plausible fit to the evidence. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) ranks among the paintings had to be removed from his room so that most influential of modern philosophers. Novelist it would look more like a temple2. Thomas Mann, playwright George Bernard Shaw, On 3 January 1889, Nietzsche was accosted by journalist H L Mencken, and philosophers Martin two Turinese policemen after making some sort of Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Jacques Derrida, and public disturbance: precisely what happened is not Francis Fukuyama – to name only a few – all known. (The often-repeated fable – that Nietzsche acknowledged Nietzsche as a major inspiration saw a horse being whipped at the other end of the for their work. Scholars today generally recognize Piazza Carlo Alberto, ran to the horse, threw his Nietzsche as: arms around the horse’s neck, and collapsed to the ground – has been shown to be apocryphal by the pivotal philosopher in the transition to post-modernism. Verrecchia3.) Fino persuaded the policemen to There have been few intellectual or artistic movements that have 1 release Nietzsche into his custody. not laid a claim of some kind to him. Nietzsche meanwhile had begun to write brief, Nietzsche succumbed to dementia in January bizarre letters. -
Nietzsche's Naturalism As a Critique of Morality and Freedom
NIETZSCHE’S NATURALISM AS A CRITIQUE OF MORALITY AND FREEDOM A thesis submitted to Kent State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts by Nathan W. Radcliffe December, 2012 Thesis written by Nathan W. Radcliffe B.S., University of Akron, 1998 M.A., Kent State University, 2012 Approved by Gene Pendleton____________________________________, Advisor David Odell‐Scott___________________________________, Chair, Department of Philosophy Raymond Craig_____________________________________, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS....................................................................................................................v INTRODUCTION............................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTERS I. NIETZSCHE’S NATURALISM AND ITS INFLUENCES....................................................... 8 1.1 Nietzsche’s Speculative‐Methodological Naturalism............................................ 8 1.2 Nietzsche’s Opposition to Materialism ............................................................... 15 1.3 The German Materialist Influence on Nietzsche................................................. 19 1.4 The Influence of Lange on Nietzsche .................................................................. 22 1.5 Nietzsche’s Break with Kant and Its Aftermath................................................... 25 1.6 Influences on Nietzsche’s Fatalism (Schopenhauer and Spinoza) -
CG Jung and the Inheritance of Immanence
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Middle Tennessee State University: Journals@MTSU C. G. Jung and the Inheritance of Immanence C.G. Jung and the Inheritance of Immanence: Traces of Spinozistic, Nietzschean, and Freudian Influence in Analytical Psychology Christopher Myers Abstract Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, was heavily influenced by both Nietzsche and Freud, both of whom were influenced, as Yovel notes in his The Adventures of Immanence, by Spinoza. Through his years of collaboration with Freud and his long-lasting fascination with Nietzsche (combined with Jung’s own semi-mystical tendencies, Jung became more of a Spinozian, than Nietzschean or Freudian. These Spinozistic traces can be detected in the framework of analytical psychology. A comparison is presented on the views of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Freud, and Jung on historical religion, the source of human motivation, and the liberating power of self- knowledge. Middle Tennessee State University 69 Scientia et Humanitas: A Journal of Student Research his investigation explores the intellectual genealogy that links seventeenth-cen- tury rationalist and Jewish ex-communicant, Baruch Spinoza, to the founder of analyticalT psychology, Carl Gustav Jung. In Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Adventures of Immanence, Yirmiyahu Yovel describes Spinoza’s influence upon Nietzsche and Freud. In Philosophical Issues in the Psychology of C.G. Jung, Marilyn Nagy investigates the inspiration of Plato, Kant, Schopenhauer and others on Jung. However, no effort has been made to in- vestigate the possibility that Spinozism might have trickled into Jungian thought through Nietzsche and Freud. -
The Curious Case of Baruch Spinoza in Walter BenJaMin’S “Toward the Critique of Violence”
The Curious Case of Baruch Spinoza in Walter Ben ja min’s “Toward the Critique of Violence” MASSIMO PALMA abstract Although Baruch Spinoza was im por tant for think ers of his gen er a tion, Walter Ben ja min seems to have com pletely ig nored the phi los o pher. Spinoza’s name ap pears just a few times in Ben ja min’s works, and Spinoza’s thought never seems to have been rel e vant to him. The only place where Ben ja min quotes a text of Spinoza’s, al beit be tween the lines, is in “Toward the Critique of Violence” (1921). Still, in this essay Ben ja min is far from enthu si as tic about the au thor of the Ethics. He names Spinoza as a pro po nent of nat u ral law the o ry, which Ben ja min dismisses in his search for a cri te rion with which to judge Gewalt. This ar ti cle seeks to in ves ti gate Ben ja min’s ap par ent hos til ity to Spinoza and to reexamine the re la tion ship be tween the two, from both a the o ret i cal and a po lit i cal per spec tive. keywords Walter Ben ja min, Baruch Spinoza, le gal vi o lence, nat u ral law, mi gra tion The names of Walter Ben ja min and Baruch Spinoza rarely ap pear along side one an other in the lit er a ture on Ben ja min. -
Nietzsche's Conception of Friendship
The University of Notre Dame Australia ResearchOnline@ND Theses 2007 Nietzsche’s Conception of Friendship Ryan C. Kinsella University of Notre Dame Australia Follow this and additional works at: https://researchonline.nd.edu.au/theses Part of the Philosophy Commons COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA Copyright Regulations 1969 WARNING The material in this communication may be subject to copyright under the Act. Any further copying or communication of this material by you may be the subject of copyright protection under the Act. Do not remove this notice. Publication Details Kinsella, R. C. (2007). Nietzsche’s Conception of Friendship (Master of Philosophy (MPhil)). University of Notre Dame Australia. https://researchonline.nd.edu.au/theses/14 This dissertation/thesis is brought to you by ResearchOnline@ND. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses by an authorized administrator of ResearchOnline@ND. For more information, please contact [email protected]. - 1- Nietzsche’s Conception of Friendship A Master of Philosophy dissertation by Ryan Kinsella University of Notre Dame Australia, July 2007 Dr. Marc Fellman, Internal Advisor, University of Notre Dame Australia Dr. Jeff Gauthier, External Advisor, University of Portland - 2- Table of Contents Introduction 5 Chapter One – Nietzsche and Friendship 14 A. Passages on Friendship 15 B. Friends as his Intended Audience 20 C. Nietzsche’s Friends 24 Chapter Two – Nietzsche’s Conception of Friendship 33 A. Human Being as Animal 34 B. Relationships and the Development of the Human Being 40 C. Nietzsche’s Conception of Friendship 44 D. Self-Interestedness and Instrumentality 55 E. Solitude 64 F. Unhealthy Friendship 69 Chapter Three – Friendship and Morality 73 A. -
The Relation Between Conception and Causation in Spinoza's
Philosophers’ volume 13, no. 3 1. Introduction Imprint february 2013 If you asked a contemporary metaphysician to list her foundational, unanalyzed notions, she might say: possibility, object and part. Or per- haps: grounding, bundle and point. If you asked Spinoza, conception and causation would be at the top of his list. He uses these notions to THE RELATION state many of his most important doctrines, including necessitarianism and substance monism, as well as to define several of his key terms, in- cluding ‘mode’ and ‘action’. A correct understanding of the relation BETWEEN between conception and causation is therefore an essential part of our understanding of Spinoza’s metaphysics. There are many different ways of understanding this relation. For example: Curley [3, p.40, 74–5] identifies conception and causation, be- CONCEPTION AND cause he thinks that they are just different ways of talking about logical dependence; Della Rocca [5, p.44] also identifies conception and cau- sation but does not assimilate them to logical dependence; and New- CAUSATION IN lands [17, p.469] suggests that causation is reducible to conception. Un- derpinning all of these interpretations is what I will call the orthodox view. I wish to challenge this view. SPINOZA'S The orthodox view is grounded in the fourth axiom of part one, 1A4, of the Ethics. It reads: “Cognition of an effect depends on, and involves, cognition of its cause.”1 Given the way that Spinoza uses ‘involves’ and METAPHYSICS ‘conceived through’, this axiom uncontroversially entails:2 causation ! conception If one thing causes another thing, then the second thing is conceived John Morrison through the first thing.