Spinoza and the Case for Philosophy

This book analyzes three often-debated questions of Spinoza's legacy: was Spinoza a religious thinker? How should we understand Spinoza's mind-body doctrine? What meaning can be given to Spinoza's notions - such as salvation, beatitude, and freedom - which are seemingly incompatible with his determinism, his secularism, and his critique of religion. Through a close reading of often-overlooked sections from Spinoza's Ethics, Elhanan Yakira argues that these seemingly conflicting elements are indeed compatible, despite Spinoza's iconoclastic meanings. Yakira argues that Ethics is an attempt at providing a purely philosophical - as opposed to theological - foundation for the theory of value and normativity.

Part I: 1. Spinoza and the question of religion; Part II. Mind and Body: 2. The exegetic inadequacy of parallelism; 3. The context; 4. Ethics II, propositions 1-13; Part III: 5. Bodies and ideas - a few general remarks; Part IV: 6. The norm of reason: adequacy, truth, knowledge, and comprehension; 7. Man, a mode of the substance; Instead of a conclusion: Salus sive Beatitude sive Libertas.

Elhanan Yakira is Schulman Professor of Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has previously taught at the Sorbonne, École Normale Supérieure in Paris, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Pennsylvania State University and Indiana University. Yakira's previous publications include Nécessité, Contrainte et Choix: la métaphysique de la liberté chez Spinoza et Leibniz (1989), winner of the 1990 Charles Lambert Prize from Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, Institut de France; La causalité de Galilée à Kant (1994); Leibniz's Theory of the Rational (with Emily Grosholz, 1998); and Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust (Cambridge, 2010).