Part of Nature: Self-Knowledge in Spinoza's Ethics

by Genevieve Lloyd

In this lucid and elegantly written book, Genevieve Lloyd reads Spinoza's philosophy as a profound articulation of ideas of individuality, selfhood, and freedom. Focusing on Spinoza's Ethics, Lloyd illuminates as well his transformation of Descartes's concepts of substance, mind, and body, and the relations between Spinoza's metaphysics and his ethical views.
Spinoza's doctrine of the uniqueness of substance has been interpreted as absorbing individual self-consciousness into an all-embracing whole. Here, Lloyd addresses the dilemmas posed by the Cartesian legacy of what it means to be a the sense of isolation of a contained intellectual substance trying to establish contact with an "external" world, the limitations of an idea of knowledge that sharply distinguishes between reason and the passions, problems in thinking about time and mortality in ways that allow no middle ground between an afterlife and annihilation, and tensions in ideals of personhood that claim to transcend sexual difference.
Throughout, Lloyd emphasizes the ethical importance of Spinoza's metaphysics. Out of his treatment of substance and its modes emerge new ways of thinking about self-consciousness, freedom, gender difference, the passions, and time. As the influence of Descartes wanes, Lloyd suggests that Spinoza's philosophy may help us rethink some of the most troubling issues surrounding our understanding of the self.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published September 1, 1994

About the author

Genevieve Lloyd (born at Cootamundra, New South Wales, 16 October 1941) is an Australian philosopher and feminist. She studied philosophy at the University of Sydney in the early 1960s and then at Somerville College, Oxford. Her D.Phil, awarded in 1973, was on 'Time and Tense'. From 1967 until 1987 she lectured at the Australian National University, during which period she developed her most influential ideas and wrote The Man of Reason, which was published in 1984. In 1987 she was appointed to the chair of philosophy at the University of New South Wales, being the first female professor of philosophy appointed in Australia.[1] On retirement, she was appointed Professor Emeritus.
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