Spinoza Beyond Philosophy

Beth Lord is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. She is the author of Kant and Spinozism: Transcendental Idealism and Immanence from Jacobi to Deleuze (2011) and Spinoza’s Ethics: an Edinburgh Philosophical Guide (2010), and editor of Spinoza Beyond Philosophy (2012) and the Bloomsbury Companion to Continental Philosophy (2009).

• Acknowledgements; Abbreviations; Contributors; Introduction - Beth Lord; 1. 'Subjectivity without the subject': Thinking beyond the subject with/through Spinoza - Caroline Williams; 2. Spinoza's Non-Humanist Humanism - Michael Mack; 3. The Ethical Relation of Bodies: Thinking with Spinoza Towards an Affective Ecology - Anthony Paul Smith; 4. Spinoza's architectural passages and geometric comportments - Peg Rawes; 5. The Secret History of Musical Spinozism - Amy Cimini; Interlude: Lance Brewer, Christina Rawls, Shelley Campbell; 6. Thinking the Future: Spinoza's Political Ontology Today - Mateusz Janik; 7. Spinoza's Empty Law: The Possibility of Political Theology - Dimitris Vardoulakis; 8. Which Radical Enlightenment?: Spinoza, Jacobinism, and Black Jacobinism - Nick Nesbitt; 9. George Eliot, Spinoza and the Ethics of Literature - Simon Calder; 10. Coleridge's Ecumenical Spinoza - Nicholas Halmi; Index.

Each essay in this thought-provoking anthology has something to recommend it independently of one's assessment of its feasibility as a reading of Spinoza. Bringing Spinoza into conversation with architecture, music, revolution, or literature, opens new paths of thought that may – or may not – yield new intellectual insights. Beth Lord must be commended for helping to create the context in which one can deliberate about the particular virtues and vices of these various conversations.