Seminar

e are pleased to announce the upcoming seminar dates for the Winter Semester (חורף תשפ”ז).

04-Nov-26

Michael A. Rosenthal | University of Toronto

Title:  “Life as a Marionette:  The Role of the Imagination in Spinoza’s Ethics, Part V”

Abstract: 

It may seem that when we arrive at Part V of Spinoza’s Ethics, the very last part in which he shows us that human freedom is tied to the very power of the intellect,  we should be able to dispense with the inadequate ideas of the imagination and proceed solely according to reason.  In this paper, however, I want to show that perhaps the most important idea—the definition of freedom as acting according to the necessity of our own nature within a determined system—is so difficult to grasp that Spinoza still has to have recourse to the imagination to make sense of it even in part V.  I shall argue that in the first part of Part V Spinoza uses reason to help us sketch an imaginative picture of the self as a kind of marionette.  It isn’t yet what it would be to live according to reason, but what it would be like to live—or as if we are living—according to reason.  And that, even though, strictly speaking, this image is false, it nonetheless useful.  This thought-image serves as a kind of aid to the individual to become free.

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Additional seminars will be held:

25-Nov-26

09-Dec-26

06-Jan-27

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