Spinoza and the Philosophy of Love

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Notes

¹ Though, as Strawser notes, there is another upcoming book by Erik Dreff on reading Spinoza as a philosopher of love: see Dreff (Forthcoming).

² All citations of the Ethics are from Curley’s translation, as found in volume 1 of his edited collection The Collected Works of Spinoza (see Spinoza (2016) in references section). Citations give the book of the Ethics first, then either the axiom, definition, or proposition number, and then, if relevant, the scholia, corollary, or lemma number. For example, ‘E4p18s’ refers to the scholium of the 18th proposition in Book 4 of the Ethics.

³ Though they contain also very interesting and contemporarily applicable discussions on Spinoza’s implicit anti-misogyny in his account of ethical marriage, despite Spinoza’s quite explicit misogyny at the end of the Political Treatise.

⁴ A different, and on my view more plausible, approach to giving a Spinozist rebuttal to Spinoza’s speciesism can be found in Chapter 6 of: Hasana Sharp. Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization. (Sharp 2011). In this chapter, Sharp tries to show some of the ways that, despite our being different than non-human animals in some ways, it can be ‘useful’ on a Spinozist reading for us to join in friendship with non-human animals (such as mutually beneficial relationships between humans and wolves).