Spinoza lectures Spinoza's hard path to freedom

Samenvatting

Moira Gatens is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney, where she was awarded an Australian Research Professorship in 2006. Gatens has published widely in social and political philosophy and in feminist studies, and is also internationally renowned as a Spinoza scholar. Her books include Feminism and Philosophy (1991), Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality (1996) and (with Genevieve Lloyd) Collective Imaginings, Spinoza Past and Present (1999). Most recently she edited the collection Feminist Interpretations of Benedict Spinoza (2009). Gatens received many awards, among others a Fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin in 2007-08 and a Visiting Professorship at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2003. Her current project is situated in the field ... of philosophy and literature, with a special focus on the relations between the thought of Spinoza, Feuerbach and George Eliot. In her two Spinoza Lectures "Spinoza's Hard Path to Freedom", Gatens presents insights from her current research: she is interested in the intricate ways in which philosophy and literature, both in their specific ways, are concerned with understanding how ways of knowing the world are linked to, and affected by, particular ways of being in the world. In her first lecture, Gatens offers a new reading of Spinoza's Ethics as well as the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus by showing how a reflection on the ethical life prompted his critique of theology and politics, highlighting the collective and situated character of knowledge and interpreting the role reason and imagination play in realizing freedom. In her second lecture, Gatens interprets the 19th century novelist and translator of Spinoza's Ethics George Eliot, and - more generally - the form of "deliberative fiction" her novels represent, as yet another way to "to enhance the collective power of human beings to become free". In discussing Spinoza and Eliot, Gatens not only opens up new historical perspectives, but also a systematic understanding of the intimate connection between knowledge, imagination, and fiction, thereby presenting us, in the form of both Spinoza's philosophy and Eliot's literature, two different paths to freedom.