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Are there limits to the ability of Spinoza’s philosophy to speak to our present? Perhaps his notion of ‘the mind of God’ is too foreign for contemporary sensibilities to contemplate? After offering...

This paper forms part of a larger project which seeks to derive a theory of art from a close reading of Spinoza's work. It focuses on the importance of the aligned terms of ingenium and dispositio,...

In the Preface to Part Four of the Ethics, Spinoza offers the reader an exemplar of human nature. However, Spinoza does not conceive of human nature as a universal in which each human being partici...

Benedict Spinoza (1632–1677) is often characterised in the history of philosophy as the rationalist philosopher par excellence. However, much contemporary critical interpretation of his thought has...

This paper explores the relationship between honour and recognition in the context of normative heterosexuality, and the implications of this relationship for sustaining and transforming problemati...

The idea that social and political institutions can be designed in order to achieve specific human ends goes back, at least, to Plato’s presentation of the appropriate form of the just city-state i...

Did George Eliot’s work as translator of the critical writings on religion of Ludwig Feuerbach and Benedict Spinoza influence her work as a novelist? Did she hold a comprehensive philosophy of religion? Through an examination of her non-fictional and fictional writings this chapter argues that we should take seriously Eliot’s claim that her novels are ‘experiments in life’. Building on the critiques of religion offered by Spinoza and Feuerbach, Eliot’s novels address the philosophical question: is morality possible in a godless world? The capacities necessary to a moral life are imagination, sympathy, and reflection. Her fiction contributes to the reformation of moral consciousness by experimenting with the interplay between these capacities.

Through a critical reading of Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel, Woman Warrior, this paper addresses Amy Allen’s criticism that Seyla Benhabib’s conception of narrative agency involves the idea of a gender-neutral core self. Allen’s criticism of Benhabib is found wanting and the notion of an ungendered self is judged incoherent. Rather, gender is one of a number of markers at work in the open-ended narrative construction of identity.

Spinoza took it to be an important psychological fact that belief cannot be compelled. At the same time, he was well aware of the compelling power that religious and political fictions can have on the formation of our beliefs. I argue that Spinoza allows that there are ‘good’ and ‘bad’ fictions. His complex account of the imagination and fiction, and their disabling or enabling roles in gaining knowledge of Nature, is a site of disagreement among commentators. The novels of George Eliot (who translated Spinoza's works) represent a significant development for those who aim to resolve such disagreement in favour of the epistemic value of the imagination and fiction. Although Eliot agreed with Spinoza that belief cannot be compelled, she nevertheless affirmed the potential of certain kinds of fiction to be not only compelling but also edifying. The parallel reading of Eliot and Spinoza offered here raises the question of whether his philosophy can accommodate a theory of art in which the artist is seen to be capable of attaining and imparting dependable knowledge.

The idea that it might be possible to explore “gender” and “genre” as conceptually coupled through the study of intellectual couplings from different historical periods is the kernel from which thi...

The Australian Research Council (ARC) grant application that resulted in the award of my Australian Professorial Fellowship (APF) grew out of an academic ‘mid-life crisis’. Like many female profess...

The paper is in four parts. The first part offers a brief reminder of the historical context for human rights as women's rights. The second part notes the relative lack of attention in human rights theory to the roles of social meaning and what has been called the ‘social imaginary’. The third part suggests that the social imaginary — understood in terms of the always present backdrop to meaningful social action — may be seen as a fruitful ‘middle ground’ upon which negotiations may take place between human rights and cultural norms. The fourth part examines a case where women's entitlements to basic human rights are compromised by men's claims to cultural or group rights. I conclude by arguing that if human rights are to accommodate women's rights then women must be recognized as legitimate stakeholders in, and valuable contributors to, the necessarily ongoing re-invention and recreation of social meaning and cultural identity.

Introduction Over the next decade, mutual obligation will undoubtedly come to be viewed as the Howard Government's major legacy to Australian social policy. In the early years of the Howard administration, mutual obligation was cast as the Australian version of Blair's `third way' and the Clinton administration's `new deal'. However, unlike the welfare reforms of the UK and US, the underlying policy approach that mutual obligation represents remains ill-defined and surrounded by implementation controversies. At different points, various government ministers have invoked the language and ideas of a range of social philosophy positions from Marshall's social citizenship through to Mead's new paternalism--and many others in between--in order to justify or explain the government's mutual obligation policy. The difficulties generated by the mutual obligation policy prompted the Howard government to commission a Welfare Reform Reference Group in late 1999 to address several aspects of its policy. There is much to commend in the resulting report of the reference group--now referred to as the McClure Report--and according to national media its basic premises received broad community support at the time of publication. Such widespread support was unsurprising given that the report adopted an approach which insisted on matching responsibilities and duties with social rights and benefits, within a `framework of reciprocity', which aims to `help individuals and communities develop their capacities for [social] participation' (McClure, 2000: 32-34). For us, the issue is not to question citizens' reciprocal obligations, or to challenge the interdependence of various social actors but rather to ask how such obligations are likely to be distributed in policy implementation. Our quarrel is not with the normative assumptions adopted in the McClure Report but rather with the vagueness of those assumptions. Such imprecision has the obvious benefit of attracting wide consensus concerning `shared values' but it has the undesirable effect of leaving open both the range of possible justifications for such policy and the precise processes of policy implementation. Mutual obligation, as policy, thus runs the risk of offering a vague solution to even more vaguely posed questions which range from concerns about a perceived growth in welfare dependency through to concerns about meeting social obligations to care for vulnerable citizens. For example, one style of policy implementation of mutual obligation may be justified through interpretations derived from Lawrence Mead's distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor, such interpretations often involving a moralistic and punitive aspect (Mead, 1997). At the same time, mutual obligation may allow interpretations which stress the reciprocal call upon all members and groups of a community to pool the costs of the risks to which we all are vulnerable and to protect those most exposed to these risks. What is unambiguously, and correctly, represented in the report is the widespread concern and anxiety over issues of responsibility, security and risk. (1) The manner in which the mutual obligation component of Australia's `new deal' is conceived and implemented is likely to have profound effects on the future shape of Australia's social security system as a whole and, for this among other reasons, it is worthy of close and critical scrutiny. In what follows we attempt first, to bring some clarity to what is at stake in the redesign of the Australian welfare system; second, to give prominence to the problem of contemporary risk as the pertinent question that lies behind the need for welfare reform; third, to offer a critical contrast between Lawrence Mead's approach to welfare reform and an approach more compatible with Marshallian social values; and finally, we suggest practical ways of understanding mutual obligation that do not sacrifice the moral defensibility of welfare reform initiatives to purely pragmatic factors. …

As a constructive alternative to the exclusionary binaries of Cartesian philosophy, Genevieve Lloyd and Moira Gatens turn to Spinoza. Spinoza's understanding of the body as "in relation" takes the focus of philosophical thought from the homo-geneous subject to the heterogeneity of the social, and the focus of politics from individual rights to collective responsibility. The implications for feminism are radical; Spinoza enables a reconceptualization of the imaginary and the possibility of a sociability of inclusion.

This paper reads Deleuze through a Spinozist lens to conceive of the human being as a dynamic and complex whole in constant interchange with its environment. The author thus moves beyond philosophical dualisms, and challenges the assumption that a hierarchical normative organization is the only possible world. Using the example of rape, she argues that micropolitical strategies might disrupt and “pass” the juridical order and open up alternative, more equitable, forms of sociability.

As a constructive alternative to the exclusionary binaries of Cartesian philosophy, Genevieve Lloyd and Moira Gatens turn to Spinoza. Spinoza's understanding of the body as “in relation” takes the focus of philosophical thought from the homogeneous subject to the heterogeneity of the social, and the focus of politics from individual rights to collective responsibility. The implications for feminism are radical; Spinoza enables a reconceptualization of the imaginary and the possibility of a sociability of inclusion.

Over thirty years ago Michele Le Dœuff coined the phrase “the Heloise complex” to refer to a certain kind of erotico-theoretical transference between a philosopher and his disciple or student.1 Alt...

This article examines the politicization of the human body focusing on the way this issue was conceived in the West. The human body has long been used as a source of metaphor for political theorists and the very notion of body politic leans on the image of a unified and discrete entity that has commanding parts and obeying parts that may be robust or ailing, strong or weak. This article suggests that aside from political theory with a rich source of metaphor, the human body also serves as the nexus where political conceptions of the universal and the particular meet.

Among the many eminently quotable lines from the corpus of Sigmund Freud are those concerning his supposition about the response of the young girl when she first sees the penis of a sibling or playmate: “She makes her judgement and her decision in a flash. She has seen it and knows that she is without it and wants to have it.” Even if a generous reader were to grant Freud his contentious supposition, a question remains: what does the girl see, and judge, on a second, or a third, or even a fourth look? According to Simone de Beauvoir, Freud's judgment about the role anatomy plays in the formation of the psychic life of women is based on “a masculine model” and envy “could not arise from a simple anatomical comparison.” “[T]his outgrowth,” Beauvoir continues, “this weak little rod of flesh can in itself inspire [young girls] only with indifference, or even disgust. The little girl's covetousness, when it exists, results from a previous evaluation of virility. Freud takes this for granted, when it should be accounted for.” Taking little for granted, Beauvoir argues that whether girls will judge the penis to be enviable, “insignificant, or even laughable” ( SS 300) will depend on its importance, its symbolic and social value “within the totality of their lives.” In any event, whatever attitude a girl may adopt, “it is wrong to assert that a biological datum is concerned” ( SS 307). Unlike Freud, Beauvoir endeavors to offer a comprehensive account of girls’ and women’s desires, attitudes, and judgments as these are formed within the totality of their always situated existences.