Spinoza and architectural thinking

ABSTRACT

Although Spinoza makes few remarks about architecture, his use of architectural examples, understood in the context of his metaphysics and theory of knowledge, reveal the architect to be a distinctive kind of human thinker. In this paper I explore the kind of thinking the architect does, first by demonstrating that Spinoza distinguishes the architect's adequate way of conceiving a building from inadequate ways of imagining one, and second by considering how Spinoza might have understood the architect to translate that adequate thinking into the practice of building and construction. I argue that for Spinoza, the architect integrates imaginative, rational, and intuitive thinking, and the parallel forms of bodily action, to understand and construct a building in its causal connections to its component materials, environment, and users. To understand the true idea of a building is therefore to understand its embeddedness in the world and its functional place in a network of modal relations.     

Goethe's ‘Wilhelm Meister’ and Spinoza

Abstract

A strong case is made in this review that Spinoza greatly influenced Goethe in his much-studied Wilhelm Meister novels, a fact not hitherto recognized, although Goethe himself acknowledged the inspiration he derived from Spinoza's work. Goethe's Werther, and his Faust, are the mythical figures of modern times with the two Wilhelm Meister novels the critical countertheme in which the voice of Spinoza is here considered the cantus firmus of outstanding significance.     

Spinoza on Fictitious Ideas and Possible Entities

The aim of this article is twofold: to provide a valid account of Spinoza’s theory of fictitious ideas, and to demonstrate its coherency with the overall modal metaphysics underpinning his philosophical system. According to Leibniz, in fact, the existence of romances and novels would be sufficient to demonstrate, against Spinoza’s necessitarianism, that possible entities exist and are intelligible, and that many other worlds different from ours could have existed in its place. I argue that Spinoza does not actually need to resort to the notion of possible entities in order to explain the incontrovertible existence of fictions and fictitious ideas. In order to demonstrate this, I will first show how, according to Spinoza, true ideas of nonexistent things need not be regarded as fictitious ideas. Then I will show by which means Spinoza can justify the real existence of fictions and fictitious ideas in the human mind through our present knowledge of actually existing things, to conclude that fictitious ideas neither add anything to what we already know of things, nor do they increase the extent of the existing conceivable reality by demanding the existence of possible non-actualised entities.     

Spinoza,Bayle, and the Enlightenment Politics of Philosophical Certainty

This article explores the complex and contested intellectual relationship between two of the key thinkers of the Early Enlightenment: Spinoza and Bayle. The key issue of contention between them is not, it is argued, the question of the existence and nature of God, but their profoundly contrasting visions of the nature of philosophy as a politically emancipatory practice. The article analyzes Bayle's rejection of Spinoza's systemic certainty, and the significance of this rejection in relation to Bayle's own anti-systemic philosophy of openness and incompletion. This contrast between Bayle and Spinoza is deployed to clarify the interpretation of Bayle's theory of toleration and of his late writings.     

Spinoza on art and the cultivation of a disposition toward joyful living

ABSTRACT

This paper forms part of a larger project which seeks to derive a theory of art from a close reading of Spinoza's work. It focuses on the importance of the aligned terms of ingenium and dispositio, which are both used to discuss the central importance of “dispostion” to our capacity to live well. While it is not possible to avoid affects, it is possible to order them in such a way that their negative impacts are lessened and their positive impacts are enhanced. We begin by underlining the importance of disposition to opening the way to understanding. We connect this to Spinoza's acknowledgement of the importance of art in helping to provide a plan for living. We turn to readings of ingenium in the work of Moreau and Balibar to further explore how the concept of disposition helps us to recognise the capacities of works of art to affect their audiences.