A PERGUNTA DE SPINOZA

Was Spinoza a Naturalist?

In this article I dispute the claim, made by several contemporary scholars, that Spinoza was a naturalist. ‘Naturalism’ here refers to two distinct but related positions in contemporary philosophy. The first, ontological naturalism, is the view that everything that exists possesses a certain character (variously defined) permitting it to be defined as natural and prohibiting it from being defin...

Spinoza Today: The Current State of Spinoza Scholarship

Stardrives and Spinoza

There are several senses in which one may speak of limits in relation to Physics. For the purposes of this essay, it is most useful to begin with the technological limitations of practical human activity. In this context, Physics both provides positive and negative information. Physical laws tell us how to achieve some goals, and informs us that others are forever out of reach. An excellent his...

Spinoza: A Stereoscopic Visually Guided Mobile Robot

Our mobile robot Spinoza embodies a sophisticated real time vision system for control of a mobile robot in a dynamic environment The complexity of our robot architecture arises from the wide variety of tasks that need to be performed and the resulting chal lenge of coordinating multiple distributed concurrent processes on a diverse range of processor architec tures including Transputers digital...

Spinoza and Kant on Suicide

In this paper I’m going to argue that both, Spinoza and Kant, construct the argument “for the impossibility of self-destruction” and examine how the concept of suicide relates to the concept of humanity in both philosophers. I will argue that Kant’s and Spinoza’s argument for the impossibility of self-destruction follows from the “external cause” premise and not from “the same subject” premise....