Benedictus De Spinoza eBooks
eBooks di Benedictus De Spinoza editi da Ionlineshopping Com di Formato Mobipocket
On the Improvement of the Understanding. E-book. Formato Mobipocket Benedictus De Spinoza - Ionlineshopping.Com, 2019 -
Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione (TIE) or On the Improvement of the Understanding is a seventeenth-century unfinished work of philosophy by the 17th century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, published posthumously in 1677. The Tractatus was first published in 1677, the year of Spinoza's death, by some of his closest friends, along with other works including the Ethica and the Tractatus Politicus. The Tractatus is an attempt to formulate a philosophical method that would allow the mind to form the clear and distinct ideas that are necessary for its perfection. It contains, in addition, reflection upon the various kinds of knowledge, an extended treatment of definition, and a lengthy analysis of the nature and causes of doubt. The characteristic of the work is the discussion of different forms of perception at Chapter IV and illustration of the best one in relation with the experience and intelligence at the next Chapter. He also addresses the issues of memory and forgetting. Spinoza commenced this treatise with the intention of examining the problem of knowledge, but the work was never completed. In his other works epistemological discussions are intimately linked with the rest of his philosophy. Indeed, even in the Treatise on the Improvement of the Understanding epistemological views are almost inseparably connected with ethical ones. That is the consequence of his characteristic conception of knowledge. For Spinoza "knowledge" is "life", not in the sense that contemplation is the highest life, but in the sense that knowledge is the means of holding together the threads of life in a systematic unity that can fill its proper place in the cosmic system. There are two things which must be borne in mind in connection with Spinoza's conception of knowledge. The first is his insistence on the active character of knowledge. The ideas or concepts by means of which thought construes reality are not like "lifeless pictures on a panel"; they are activities by which reality is apprehended; they are part of reality, and reality is activity. The second point is that Spinoza does not divorce knowing from willing. Man always acts according to his lights. If a man's endeavours appear to fall short of his knowledge, that is only because his knowledge is not really what it is held to be, but is wanting in some respect. On the one hand, reason, for Spinoza, is essentially the "practical reason". On the other hand, the highest expression of willing is experienced in that striving for consistency and harmony which is so characteristic of reason.
Ethics — Part 1. E-book. Formato Mobipocket Benedictus De Spinoza - Ionlineshopping.Com, 2019 -
Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order (Latin: Ethica, ordine geometrico demonstrata), usually known as the Ethics, is a philosophical treatise written in Latin by Benedict de Spinoza. It was written between 1664 and 1665 and was first published posthumously in 1677. The book is perhaps the most ambitious attempt to apply the method of Euclid in philosophy. Spinoza puts forward a small number of definitions and axioms from which he attempts to derive hundreds of propositions and corollaries, such as "When the Mind imagines its own lack of power, it is saddened by it", "A free man thinks of nothing less than of death", and "The human Mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the Body, but something of it remains which is eternal." According to Spinoza, God has "attributes". One attribute is 'extension', another attribute is 'thought', and there are infinitely many such attributes. Since Spinoza holds that to exist is to act, some readers take 'extension' to refer to an activity characteristic of bodies (for example, the active process of taking up space, exercising physical power, or resisting a change of place or shape). They take 'thought' to refer to the activity that is characteristic of minds, namely thinking, the exercise of mental power. Each attribute has modes. All bodies are modes of extension, and all ideas are modes of thought. The first part of the book addresses the relationship between God and the universe. Tradition held that God exists outside of the universe, created it for a reason, and could have created a different universe if he chose. Spinoza denies each point. According to Spinoza, God is the natural world. As with many of Spinoza's claims, what this means is a matter of dispute. Spinoza claims that the things that make up the universe, including human beings, are God's "modes". This means that everything is, in some sense, dependent upon God. The nature of this dependence is disputed. Some scholars say that the modes are properties of God in the traditional sense. Others say that modes are effects of God. Either way, the modes are also logically dependent on God's essence, in this sense: everything that happens follows from the nature of God, just like how it follows from the nature of a triangle that its angles are equal to two right angles. Since God had to exist with the nature he has, nothing that has happened could have been avoided, and if God has fixed a particular fate for a particular mode, there is no escaping it. As Spinoza puts it, "A thing which has been determined by God to produce an effect cannot render itself undetermined." God's creation of the universe is not a decision, much less one motivated by a purpose.