Synopsis
Spinoza on the Human Perspective gathers a variety of contributions concerned with the role of the human perspective and the human lifeform in Spinoza's philosophy, as well as the resources that Spinoza provides for such a philosophy. While significant parts of the current scholarship tend towards ascribing an acosmist view, more recent interpretations have begun to consider human life and specifically human attitudes as being of fundamental concern to Spinoza. It is the aim of this book to draw attention to those parts of Spinoza's philosophy where he is explicitly engaged in a reflection on human life, or some peculiarity of it. The chapters collected here argue in various ways that notions such as 'human being' and 'human life' play a significant role in his thought, and that they do so in non-trivial ways. These hitherto neglected perspectives on Spinoza's philosophy result in accounts of a Spinozistic universe that is no longer completely devoid of particulars and of all those features of reality that are usually taken to be fundamental to the human condition and experience, such as subjectivity or perspectivity, temporality, and emotional salience. In doing so, this book provides new avenues for the study of Spinoza's philosophy. It highlights the role of the human perspective for his metaphysics, ethics, philosophy of mind, epistemology, and social and political philosophy. Accordingly, the volume contains highly original contributions from leading scholars that will have a notable impact on the full breath of Spinoza studies. This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.
About the Author
Ursula Renz is Professor at the University of Graz, Austria. She held positions at the University of Klagenfurt, Roskilde University, the ETH and the University of Zurich; was a visiting scholar at Yale University, the ENS Lyon, Harvard University, the University of Konstanz, the Warwick Center for Advanced Studies and visiting professor at the ENS Lyon (2018). She specializes in the history of early modern philosophy, late 19th/early 20th century philosophy and the history of analytic philosophy. Sarah Tropper is Assistant Professor at the University of Graz and Research Fellow at the University of Toronto. She obtained her PhD from King's College London with a thesis on Leibniz's metaphysics and has since worked and published on the early modern rationalists. Oliver Istvan Toth is an Assistant Professor at the University of Heidelberg. He obtained his PhD from University of Graz with a thesis on Spinoza's philosophy of mind. His research focuses on the theoretical background of debates in Spinoza's and Hegel's practical philosophy. Barnaby R. Hutchins held research positions at Bar-Ilan University, Alpen-Adria-University Klagenfurt, Ghent University, and Technion Israel Institute of Technology. His research is mostly concerned with the intersections of metaphysics and biology in the early modern period. Philip Waldner is a Coordinator for the ethics committee of FH Campus Wien (Vienna). He obtained his PhD from the University of Graz with a thesis about Spinoza's political philosophy. His areas of expertise include philosophy of language, ethics and political philosophy.
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