Browsing by Subject "Spinoza"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3

Open Access
The fragility of rationality: George Eliot on akrasia and the law of consequences
(Taylor&Francis, 2020) Fessenbecker, Patrick
George Eliot often uses the language of determinism in her novels, but we do not understand her view very well by treating such phrasing as addressing debates about the freedom of will directly. Instead she uses seemingly deterministic terms, like the ‘law of consequences', to depict and analyse a particular problem in moral psychology: those instances where we ourselves make it impossible to act on our own best judgements. When we fail to act on our best judgement, this has downstream effects, since it can produce a gap between prudential rationality and one's all-things-considered judgement. Surveying depictions of this problem in Silas Marner, Adam Bede, and Romola, I argue that it's a revealing problem for Eliot’s larger view, bringing together her objections to consequentialism, her recognition of the fragility of virtue, and her account of the role of sympathy in practical deliberation.
Open Access
Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of art : the cruelty of affect
(1999) Eken, Bulent
In this work the influential contemporary French philosopher Gilles Deleuze' s aesthetic theory has been analysed with regard to its philosophical origins. Baruch Spinoza, whose influence is felt in the whole of Deleuze' s ouevre, proves to be the basic figure of his approach to art as well. Gilles Deleuze sets out to formulate a vitalist theory of art, the scope of which requires that the categories of judgement and reception be displaced. This scope situates artistic activity in a generalised creativity, where reception and judgement find their places as points of break and tension which could still be examined within the system of creation.
Open Access
Temporality and belief : time of the political from the perspective of an ethics of immanence in the philosophy of Deleuze
(2012) Yalım, P. Burcu
The political as object of philosophy is conventionally caught up, vis-à-vis philosophy, in its status as object. They are together but held apart in that the relation between the political and the philosophical tasks is one in which philosophy assumes the function of reflection upon the conditions of the political, while the political itself can be said to be romanticized in this amorous distance between the two. The philosophy of Deleuze (and Guattari) which is considered in this study as a forceful break with and turning away from this precise attitude which both weakens thought and strips the political off of its vital force, is often criticized in contemporary philosophical studies as being apolitical. This situation is considered here as a consequence of the contemporary understanding of the domain of the political as a universal given of a certain order. To challenge this conception, Deleuze’s philosophy is reconsidered first in relation to Spinoza in terms of the ethics of immanence, and then in relation to Bergson in terms of temporality in order to determine the specificity of his thinking of politics both in relation to an in difference from both. It is suggested here that once the political is subjected to such a treatment by Deleuze, it assumes a direction of change in that this divergence can no longer be contained within the contemporary understanding of the political but requires thinking of politics in another way.