Reconceiving Spinoza

In Reconceiving Spinoza, Newlands returns to Spinoza’s self-described foundational project and provides an integrated interpretation of his metaphysical system and the way in which his metaphysics shapes, and is shaped by, his moral program. One of the overarching theses of this book is that conceptual relations form the backbone of Spinoza’s explanatory project and perform a surprising amount of work in his metaphysics and ethics. Conceptual relations are the philosophical grease that keeps the Spinozistic machine running smoothly, allowing him to do everything from reconciling monism with diversity to providing non-prudential grounds for altruism within an ethical egoist framework. One of the author’s main goals is to exhibit how much work conceptual relations do for Spinoza and how much seeing this changes our understanding of his philosophical outlook. Furthermore, given Spinoza’s metaphysics of individuals, a moral agent’s interests and even self-identity can vary, relative to some of these different ways of being conceived. This will have the startling implication that Spinoza’s ethical egoism, when combined with his concept-sensitive metaphysics, is ultimately a call to a radical kind of self-transcendence. We will thus be challenged to reconceive not only the world, but also Spinoza’s project, and perhaps even ourselves, along the way.