Research

Forthcoming “Spinoza's Motivational Pluralism," Philosophers' Imprint

While psychological egoism is held in philosophical disrepute these days, most Anglophone Spinoza scholars confidently ascribe this position to him. Perhaps the most prominent alternative ascribes to Spinoza a hedonistic theory of motivation, which, while more plausible as an interpretation, faces many of the same philosophical problems. In this paper I argue that, fortunately, there is a better interpretation of Spinoza’s theory of motivation that avoids saddling him with a philosophically implausible position. Spinoza is neither a psychological egoist nor a psychological hedonist, but is rather a thoroughgoing motivational pluralist, or one who thinks that we can intrinsically desire a disparate range of objects that do not fall under any single guise. But while he is a motivational pluralist, he is also in some (non-psychological) sense an egoist and a hedonist. By examining how Spinoza’s psychological pluralism coheres with his non-psychological egoism and hedonism, we can appreciate the explanatory power of his theory of motivation, showing how he preserves the possibility of universal intelligibility without claiming that we always act under a single invariant guise. 

2024. “Humility as a Philosophical Concept: an Introduction,” in Humility: A History (Oxford Philosophical Concepts), ed. Justin Steinberg (Oxford). 

2023. “The Affirmative Mind: Spinoza on Striving under the Attribute of Thought,"Ergo, Vol 10. 

In the Ethics, Spinoza advances two apparently irreconcilable construals of will [voluntas]. Initially, he presents will as a short-hand way of referring to the volitions that all ideas involve, namely affirmations and negations. But just a few propositions later, he defines it as striving when it is “related only to the mind” (3p9s). It is difficult to see how these two construals can be reconciled, since to affirm or assent to some content is to adopt an attitude with a cognitive (mind-to-world) direction of fit, while to strive to persevere in one’s being would seem to be to adopt an attitude with a conative (world-to-mind) direction of fit. I defend the consistency of Spinoza's account by arguing that it means to strive under the attribute of thought is just for an idea to affirm the existence of its object. This account of affirmation coheres with established accounts of affirmation in early modern philosophy and preserves the systematicity of Spinoza’s account of mind in ways that other interpretations do not.

2023. “Superstition, Enthusiasm, and the Radical Enlightenment from Hobbes to Hume," in Fanaticism and the History of Philosophy, ed. Paul Katsafanas (Routledge), 67 - 82.

Many contemporary accounts of fanaticism present the fanatic as intolerant (Passmore 2003, Katsafanas 2019) or fundamentally hostile to civil society (Colas 1997). In this chapter, I push back against this understanding by examining the status of the “fanatic” or “enthusiast” (these terms were used interchangeably) in the early modern period, as viewed from the perspective of the radical enlightenment. According to this tradition, it was not the putatively divinely-inspired enthusiasts or fanatics who were the disturbers of the peace; it was their sworn enemies: the superstitious clergy. In the Anglo-Dutch context, “fanatics” found common ground with the likes of Hobbes and Spinoza, who sought to eliminate forms of authority, spiritual or secular, that might compete with the authority of the civil sovereign. And they advanced principled arguments in defense of religious toleration, revealing themselves to be, as Hume later puts it, friends to civil liberty. I conclude by arguing that we should either revise our understanding of fanaticism or deny that “fanaticism” is a stable (transhistorical) concept and so cede the analysis of fanaticism to the social sciences.

2022. “Spinoza’s Dynamic Theory of Mind in the 21st Century,” Journal of Spinoza Studies, 1.1, 111 – 120.

In this paper I maintain that Spinoza systematizes independently credible accounts of belief-formation, affect, and desire into an intriguing general theory of how the mind works. His account also explains disparate downstream psychological phenomena, including: (1) emotional responses to fiction; (2) belief perseverance; (3) the reduction of cognitive dissonance; (4) epistemic conservativism that opens us up to confirmation bias, identity protection, and intolerance. Given the promise of Spinoza’s program, I conclude with a plea for further philosophical engagement. 

2020. "Spinoza on Security and the Value of Hope,” part of critical exchange, “Spinoza: Thoughts on Hope in our Political Present,” ed. Moira Gatens, Contemporary Political Theory, 20, 200 – 231.  

In my part of this critical exchange, I present different models of hope-- an unstable hope buoyed by fear and anxiety, a form of hope that is a mere indicator of wellbeing, and a form of hope that is at once intrinsically good and supportive of agential capacities-- showing that Spinoza was very attuned to these differences and that he sought to promote in his political works a version of the third (empowering) form of hope. I conclude with a plea for a kind of proleptic hope in dark political times, since it is only by acting hopefully in bleak circumstances that we can create conditions that might one day justify this hope.

2020. “Politics as a Model of Pedagogy in Spinoza,” Ethics and Education, 15(2), 158 – 172. 

In this paper, I argue that Spinoza’s political theory gives us a model for how he might have approached a treatise on moral education. Indeed, his account of the method and aims of politics resembles Renaissance humanist rhetorical approaches to pedagogy – particularly, the work of sixteenth century Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives – so strongly that it is hardly an exaggeration conclude that, for him, politics is education writ large. For Spinoza and for Vives, the governor/instructor must study the prevailing character, or ingenium, of the subject and adopt means that promote the cognitive and emotional development of the subject, which can be accomplished only to the extent that subjects willingly participate in their own governance-or-instruction. Spinoza joins this rhetorical procedure to a Hobbesian scientific approach to studying ingenia, resulting in a political method that is part science, part art.

2018. “Two Puzzles Concerning Spinoza’s Conception of Belief,” European Journal of Philosophy, 26(1), 261 – 282.  

Spinoza's account of belief entails that if A has two ideas, p and q, with incompatible content, A believes that p (and not that q) if the idea of p is stronger than the idea of q. This seems to leave little space for dominant non-beliefs, or cases in which there is discord between one’s beliefs and one’s affective-behavioral responses. And yet Spinoza does allow for two classes of dominant non-beliefs: efficacious fictions [fictiones] and ideas that conduce to akrasia. I show how Spinoza can account for dominant non-beliefs within his model of cognition by distinguishing between the doxastic and the affective powers of ideas and by suggesting that doxastic power is best understood diachronically. While other scholars have stressed the elegance of Spinoza’s account of ideas, this paper highlights the sophistication and flexibility of his account.

2016. “Affect, Desire, and Judgement in Spinoza’s Account of Motivation,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 24(1), 67 – 87. Selected as runner up for the Rogers Prize for the best article published in the BJHP in 2016.

Two priority problems frustrate our understanding of Spinoza on desire [cupiditas]. The first problem concerns the relationship between desire and the other two primary affects, joy [laetitia] and sadness [tristitia]. Desire seems to be the oddball of this troika, not only because, contrary to the very definition of an affect, desires do not themselves consist in changes in one’s power of acting, but also because desire seems at once more and less basic than joy and sadness. The second problem concerns the priority of desires and evaluative judgements. While 3p9s and 3p39s suggest that evaluative judgements are (necessarily) posterior to desires, Andrew Youpa has recently argued that for Spinoza rational evaluative judgements can give rise to, rather than arise out of, desires. I offer solutions to these problems that reveal the elegance and coherence of Spinoza's account of motivation. Ultimately, I claim that whereas emotions and desires stand in a non-reductive, symmetrical relationship to one another, evaluative judgements must be understood as asymmetrically dependent on, and reducible to, emotions or desires. This interpretation sheds light on our understanding of Spinoza’s cognitivist account of emotion. For Spinoza, while emotions are representational, they are not underpinned by evaluative judgements. Rather than inflating emotions to include evaluative judgements, he deflates evaluative judgements, treating them as emotions, or valenced representations, and nothing more.

2014. “An Epistemic Case for Empathy,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 95, 47 – 71.   

Much recent work on empathy assumes that empathy is justificatorily primitive—that is, one cannot give non-question-begging reasons for empathizing. In this paper I argue that there are independent epistemic reasons for cultivating empathy. In the first section, I present a basic account of empathy, maintaining that it requires the satisfaction of two conditions: (1) the Affective Re-enactment Condition [ARC] and (2) the Apprehension Condition [AC]. In the second section, I consider whether the information that one gains through empathy is uniquely tied to this mode of apprehension, concluding that while an affirmative response would strengthen the epistemic case, one can build a strong epistemic argument while remaining agnostic. In section three, I discuss two ways of analyzing the merits of information, namely, in terms of the notions of relevance and user-friendliness. I proceed to defend empathic information in light of these axes of evaluation, showing first why empathic information fosters the achievement of basic cognitive goals, then indicating how this account can be strengthened by appealing to empathy’s contribution to social epistemology and the satisfaction of democratic goals. In the fourth and final section, I raise and respond to challenges to the preceding account.

2013. “Imitation, Representation, and Humanity in Spinoza’s Ethics,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 51(3), 383 – 407.  

In Ethics IVP50S, Spinoza claims that “one who is moved to aid others neither by reason nor by pity is rightly called inhuman. For (by IIIP27) he seems to be unlike a man." At first blush, the claim seems implausible, as it relies on the dubious assumption that beings will necessarily imitate the affects of conspecifics. In the first two sections of this paper, I explain why Spinoza accepts this thesis and show how this claim can be made compatible with his account of representation. In the third and final section I offer an auxiliary defense of the thesis, showing that, according to Spinoza, to be human is to be sociable, and sociability depends on the imitation of the affects.

2011. “Spinoza on Human Purposiveness and Mental Causation,” in Logical Analysis and the History of Philosophy, Special Volume on Teleology, 51 – 70. 

In this paper I present the problem of mental causation for Spinoza and consider two recent attempts to respond to the problem on Spinoza’s behalf. While these interpretations certainly shed some light on Spinoza’s account of cognitive economy, I argue that both fail to point the way out of the problem because they fail to differentiate between two forms of representation, one of which is causally efficacious, one of which is not. I close by suggesting that there is reason to believe that Spinoza’s account of mind avoids some of the problems typically associated with mental causation.

2010. “Benedict Spinoza: Epistemic Democrat,” History of Philosophy Quarterly, 27(2), 145 –164. 

In this paper, I maintain—contrary to those commentators who regard him as a principled republican—that at the core of Spinoza’s political theory is an instrumental, rather than an intrinsic, defense of democratic procedures. Specifically, Spinoza embraces democratic decision procedures primarily because they tend to result in better decisions, defined relative to a procedure-independent standard of correctness or goodness. In contemporary terms, Spinoza embraces an epistemic defense of democracy. Spinoza's epistemic case for democracy not only anticipates contemporary argument, but also includes largely neglected lines of argumentation that reveal both the potential epistemic advantages and disadvantages of democracy.

2009. “Spinoza on Civil Liberation,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 47(1), 35-58.  Winner of JHP award for best article of 2009. 

In the final chapter of the Tractactus Theologico-Politicus, Spinoza declares that: “the purpose of the state is, in reality, freedom.” While this remark obviously purports to tell us something important about Spinoza’s conception of the commonwealth, it is not clear exactly what is revealed. Recently a number of scholars have interpreted this passage in a way that supports the view that Spinoza was a liberal for whom civic norms are rather more modest than the freedom of the Ethics. Against this view, I provide an interpretation of Spinoza’s account of civil liberation that enables us to view the political writings as an extension of his larger ethical enterprise. Specifically, I show that, according to Spinoza, the state can promote robust liberty in a variety of ways, not least by influencing the behavioral patterns and affective dispositions of its citizens.

2008. “On Being Sui Iuris: Spinoza and the Republican Idea of Liberty,” History of European Ideas, 34(3), 239-249. Reprinted in Spinoza and Law, ed. André Santos Campos (London: Ashgate), 2015.

Spinoza’s use of the phrase “sui iuris” in the TP gives rise to the following problem. On the one hand, one is said to be sui iuris to the extent that one is rational, and to the extent that one is rational, one will steadfastly obey the laws of the state. However, Spinoza also states that to the extent that one adheres to the laws of the state, one is not sui iuris, but rather stands under the power [sub potestate] of the state (TP 3/5). This seems to yield the paradoxical conclusion that one can be sui iuris only if one is not sui iuris. In this paper I offer an interpretation of Spinoza’s notion of being sui iuris that enables us to overcome this paradox and sheds light on Spinoza’s relationship to the republican tradition. To overcome the paradox, we must distinguish between two ways in which Spinoza uses the expression “sui iuris,” which correspond to two different conceptions of power: potentia and potestas. This distinction not only allows us to save Spinoza from internal inconsistency, it also enables us to see one important way in which he stands outside of the republican tradition, since he conceives of liberty not as constituted by independence, or citizenship in a res publica, but as being powerful.