内容
Samuel Newlands presents a sweeping new interpretation of Spinoza's metaphysical system and the way in which his metaphysics shapes, and is shaped by, his moral program. Newlands also shows how Spinoza can be fruitfully read alongside and through recent developments in contemporary metaphysics and ethics. Conceptual relations are seen as the backbone of Spinoza's explanatory project and perform a surprising and underappreciated amount of work in his metaphysics and ethics. Conceptual relations are the philosophical grease that keeps the Spinozistic machine running smoothly, allowing him to do everything from reconciling monism with diversity to providing non-prudential grounds for altruism within an ethical egoist framework. Furthermore, given Spinoza's metaphysics of individuals, a moral agent's interests and even self-identity can vary, relative to some of these different ways of being conceived. This will have the startling implication that Spinoza's ethical egoism, when combined with his concept-sensitive metaphysics, is ultimately a call to a radical kind of self-transcendence. Readers will thus be challenged to reconceive not only the world, but also Spinoza's project, and perhaps even themselves, along the way.