![]() And when "degree freedom" sufficiently approximates absolute freedom - crossing some undefined, and perhaps indeterminate, threshold - we may abandon "degree" language and refer to it simply as human freedom, full stop. Finite things can obtain only a degree of freedom. Absolute freedom, defined in EID7, applies only to God. Kisner attempts to square this circle (Chapter 1) by distinguishing between different senses of freedom. But even though these formulations seem to preclude human freedom, Spinoza consistently maintains that humans can be free, or adequate, causes. ![]() In Spinoza's terms, freedom requires that a thing be a fully adequate cause of its effect ( EIIID1). Take, for instance, his notorious definition of freedom in the Ethics: "that thing is said to be free which exists solely from the necessity of its own nature, and is determined to action by itself alone" ( EID7). Some of what Spinoza has to say about freedom in general seems to render human freedom impossible. The first several chapters focus on freedom, which is the norm that guides Spinoza's practical philosophy. Kisner succeeds in bringing into full relief the complexity of Spinoza's view of moral agency, in which the agent cannot simply depend on reason to quell the passions or to dictate how to act, but must rely on the imagination and the passions to make dynamic, situated practical judgments. He draws not only on the Ethics but also on Spinoza's early treatises and later political writings to sketch a compelling portrait of Spinoza as a formidable ethical philosopher whose chief concern, across his corpus, is with human liberation. Matthew Kisner's new book, Spinoza on Human Freedom, helps to correct this pattern of neglect. Indeed, so much scholarly attention has been lavished on Spinoza's metaphysics that it is easy to forget what the title of Spinoza's magnum opus so clearly announces: this is a work of ethical philosophy. Spinoza's Ethics opens with such a heady and original metaphysics that critics and scholars often get ensnared in the rich tangle of questions raised in Parts I and II.
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