Desire and Affect: Spinoza as Psychologist

Desire and Affect brings together leading international scholars to provide one of the few comprehensive accounts of Spinoza's rational psychology and its major themes and wide-ranging influence. The papers were first presented at the third conference in the international series, organized biannually at the Hebrew University by the Jerusalem Spinoza Institute, and dedicated each time to one book of the Ethics. The essays collected in this volume provide a detailed analysis of the arguments of Book III of the Ethics and examine the different aspects of Spinoza's psychology centered on the concepts of desire and affect. They also include a thorough exploration of Spinoza's account of the emotions and its relation to the theory of conatus, his overall philosophical project, as well as its relevance to contemporary psychology, philosophy, economics and theology (in that context, philosopher Donald Davidson offers his own reading of the mind/body relation in Spinoza). The contributors include Yirmiyahu Yovel, Emilia Giancotti, Jean-Marie Beyssade, Richard Schacht and Aaron Ben-Ze'ev, among others.