Articles
Though all fields of inquiry have to struggle with their own unwelcome truths regarding unknowability, philosophy’s relationship with unknowability is special. But philosophy’s woes regarding unknowability are all of our woes, since what philosophy reveals as unknowable are pivotal presumptions that are implicated in the general conceptual framework we all presume in pursuing our lives with some minimum degree of coherence. When philosophical reflection reveals that we are not entitled to these presumptions, then our entire grip on coherence seems to loosen. Unknowability then seems not to be localized within some highly specialized field but rather to engulf us globally.
Philosophy can help us navigate the moral dilemmas of the Covid-19 crisis.
People who ponder morality for a living—moral philosophers—often concoct thought experiments involving wildly improbable scenarios to stress test our theories. Consider the rule that we should take whatever action is necessary to save the most lives, which seems like a no-brainer. But now suppose a healthy young man comes to the hospital for a routine test. As it happens, the hospital is treating six mortally ill patients, each in need of a different vital organ. So the doctors decide that they should euthanize the young man and use his organs to pull six patients from the jaws of death. This scenario is a challenge to utilitarianism—the view that doing right consists of acting to achieve the greatest good of the greatest number. The doctors have done that—but have they done the right thing?
How does a citizen respond when a democracy that prides itself on being exceptional betrays its highest principles? Plato despaired, but he also pointed the way to renewal.
What happens when a society, once a model for enlightened progress, threatens to backslide into intolerance and irrationality—with the complicity of many of its own citizens? How should that society’s stunned and disoriented members respond? Do they engage in kind, resist, withdraw, even depart? It’s a dilemma as old as democracy itself.
Twenty-four centuries ago, Athens was upended by the outcome of a vote that is worth revisiting today. A war-weary citizenry, raised on democratic exceptionalism but disillusioned by its leaders, wanted to feel great again—a recipe for unease and raw vindictiveness, then as now. The populace had no strongman to turn to, ready with promises that the polis would soon be winning, winning like never before. But hanging around the agora, volubly engaging residents of every rank, was someone to turn on: Socrates, whose provocative questioning of the city-state’s sense of moral superiority no longer seemed as entertaining as it had in more secure times. Athenians were in no mood to have their views shaken up. They had lost patience with the lively, discomfiting debates sparked by the old man. In 399 b.c., accused of impiety and corrupting the young, Socrates stood trial before a jury of his peers—one of the great pillars of Athenian democracy. That spring day, the 501 citizen-jurors did not do the institution proud. More of them voted that Socrates should die than voted him guilty in the first place.
This chapter focuses on literary artists—that is, novelists, poets, and playwrights—who have shown fascination with Baruch Spinoza’s philosophy. The fictionalization of Spinoza’s life begins during the Enlightenment period and continues until today.
The multifaceted literary attraction to Spinoza becomes only more remarkable when one considers how little it was reciprocated. For all the attention that literary artists have paid to Spinoza, he appears to have accorded little thought to the arts. This chapter first examines why Spinoza has paid little attention to the arts before turning to literary figures who have made Spinoza the central character of their work, including Gotthold Lessing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Hölderlin, Novalis, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Heinrich Heine, Matthew Arnold, Herman Melville, George Eliot, Jorge Luis Borges, Zbigniew Herbert, Eugene Ostashevsky, Goce Smilevski, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. It concludes by discussing how compatible literary Spinoza is with philosophical Spinoza.
Spinoza believed that there was only one substance in reality, which he called “God or nature.” A number of leading contemporary philosophers have defended monism, this strange and beautiful idea that the cosmos is the source of all being. This book explores both the historical roots of the monism in Spinoza, and its flowering in the 21st century.
Goff, Philip (ed.) (2011). Spinoza on Monism. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave-Macmillan.