Spinoza on the Human Perspective

This volume gathers various contributions on the role of the human perspective and the human lifeform in Spinoza’s philosophy as well as on 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. 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, and the texts collected here argue in various ways that notions such as ‘human being’, ‘human life’, and related notions play an important 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 by highlighting the role of the human perspective for his metaphysics, ethics, philosophy of mind, epistemology, and social as well as political philosophy. Thus, the volume contains highly original contributions from leading scholars that is going to have an impact on the full breath of Spinoza studies.