Komaan, nog
maar een dissertatie over Spinoza: die van Amanda Parris, van wie ik geen foto
vond. Het zal voorlopig de laatste zijn, maar zodra ik er weer een op mijn pad tegenkom, zal ik die melden.
Amanda K.
Parris received her BA in philosophy from the University of California,
Berkeley. She began her graduate studies in German idealism, principally
Hegel’s Science of Logic, and nineteenth and twentieth century continental
philosophy. She then turned to the thinkers of the seventeenth century,
focusing on the philosophy of Spinoza, a standpoint which she has never
abandoned. Amanda is near completion of her dissertation, entitled “Immanent
Causation in Spinozas Concept of Human Freedom.” [Cf.] De uiteindelijke titel werd een iets andere:
Amanda
Parris, The logic of imagination: a
Spinozan critique of imaginative freedom. PhD-thesis Department of
Philosophy, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, , Chicago, Illinois,
juli 2018 [PDF]
Abstract:
“Taking seriously Spinoza's claims that truth is the
standard of both itself and the false and that imaginative thought is in itself
true, this dissertation is an inquiry into the truth of imaginative freedom,
that is, an explanation of its causes and, more importantly, its effects on
life. The Spinozan imagination is a power by which the human being can be
disempowered and so I seek to explain what the imagination can do. Starting
from the Spinozan image, the thought and affect born of the arrant encounters
of the individual in the infinite relation of nature's immanent selfproduction,
I identify the logic of the imagination, or the mechanisms by which it orders
and connects images, in the Cartesian and Hobbesian configurations of freedom.
Defending each thinker against the charges of inconsistency or incoherence, I
treat Descartes and Hobbes's images of freedom as models of the operations of
imagination, especially the damaged lives these images engender. In explaining
that Cartesian selfdetermination is produced by the presenting and hypostatic
mechanisms of imagination and guaranteed by the anthropotheological mirror of
divine and human freedom effected by the appropriative mechanism, we are forced
to see that Cartesian freedom is not, as Spinoza puts it “of use for life,” but
disempowers through absolute blame, an image of freedom that limits freedom to
the will and separates power from efficacy. In explaining that Hobbesian
freedom from impediment is produced by the exclusionary mechanism of the
imagination, we are forced to countenance the lupine sociality born of Hobbes’s
refusal of the incommon between individuals. Because, as Spinoza puts it,
imaginative freedom is the greatest affect of all (E5p5), the critique of
imaginative freedom serves to create the affective conditions for overcoming
freedom "without others" and realizing the collective empowerment
necessary for true freedom.” [Cf.]
Ik noteer
even dat ze ook enige malen aan de orde stelt Cornelis de Deugd, The Significance of Spinoza’s First Kind of
Knowledge (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1966): “the first English-language work
devoted to Spinoza’s concept of imagination.” [p. 2]
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