Spinoza, money, and desire

Vague Desire: The Sorites and the Money Pump

An important foundational project in understanding language use is the Gricean [3] program of reducing meaning to communicative intentions. Here I will fill in some details in the Gricean picture, by outlining how linguistic vagueness arises from indeterminacies in preferences, as studied in models from economics and psychology. (The proposal is related to Fara’s [2] treatment of “vague desire”...

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 Today: The Current State of Spinoza Scholarship

Hungry for money: the desire for caloric resources increases the desire for financial resources and vice versa.

This report attempts to provide an evolutionary explanation for humans' motivation to strive for money in present-day societies. We propose that people's desire for money is a modern derivate of their desire for food. In three studies, we show the reciprocal association between the incentive value of food and of money. In Study 1, hungry participants were less likely than satiated participants ...

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....