Spinoza: Superior Empiricist
This paper was provoked by two things. First by a fascinating comment in Deleuze’s Expressionism in Philosophy (which he repeats in Practical Philosophy) where he writes that the common notions must be understood as more biological than mathematical. Second by a worry that despite their best efforts and intentions, recent attempts to switch and develop the focus of investigation in Spinoza to his account of the imagination have, by downplaying or ignoring the role of reason, lost somethng crucial for our ability to distinguish between servitude and freedom.Why are Spinoza’s common notions interesting or relevant to contemporary political theory? There have been a number of excellent works that treat of the fundamental importance of the imagination as far as political organisation is concerned. I am thinking in particular of Balibar’s Spinoza and Politics (and a number of his essays), Lloyd and Gatens’ Collective Imaginings and of course Negri’s The Savage Anomaly. The necessity of engaging with the intersection of Spinoza’s theory of imagination and politics would be sufficiently justified for no other reason than that most people, most of the time, in their interactions,
Some topics in this essay:
Deleuze Macherey, Joyful Passions, IIIP3 IIIP7, IV Ethics, Lloyd Gatens, Fluctuatio Animi, Deleuze Churchlands, Ethics Spinoza, Repetition Deleuze, Likewise Spinoza, common notions, joyful passions, inadequate ideas, adequate ideas, staying afloat, common notion, existence joyful passions, macherey 1996, joyful passion, existence joyful, essence mind, solely terms own, formation common notions, form common notions, mind constituted adequate,
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Approximate Word count = 8374
Approximate Pages = 33 (250 words per page double spaced)
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