In Radical Enlightenment, J. I. Israel gives no attention to the critique of religion expounded by Hume in the second half of the 18th century. Nevertheless, Hume, in elaborating his criticism from the methodological standpoint of the “Moderate Enlightenment”, that of experience, provides an original foundation to the critique of religion in the context of “Radical Enlightenment”. What is more, the conclusion of his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion leads one in thinking that “Radical Enlightenment” might have been caught in the (...) net of theological dialectic in its opposition to Christianity. (shrink)

Philosophy has long been fascinated by miracles, and with good reason. Where, however, the problem of the miracle once offered unparalleled insight into the inner workings of natural laws and of human knowledge, today, the attention commanded by it is essentially political. The sovereign’s miraculous suspension is the most well studied of these political dimensions, but this formulation is, in fact, ill-suited to the complexities inherent in the concept of the miracle. Political theology understands the miracle poorly, for it captures (...) only the inaugural movement of exception; it knows nothing of the social and political conditions it inspires. A key claim defended in this article is that the miracle possesses continuing interest for philosophy precisely because it lies in the heart of contemporary political formations, instituting a bond that tethers a collective to its present. It is thus more interesting as a figure of inception than of exception. The miraculous is uniformly distinguished as the unengendered, the neutral point of equilibrium against which any distribution of beings is measured. This is the meaning given the miraculous in the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and this article frames the political aspect of that theme by developing their concept of miraculation, which foregrounds the movement of inception. The article works out a conceptual genealogy, tracing the descent of the miracle back from Deleuze and Guattari to Baruch Spinoza and David Hume. Each contributes an element essential for the constitution of miraculation. It is argued that the miracle has always bound ‘desire and the social’, though in diverse ways. (shrink)

This paper explores the common ground in the views on natural law, justice and sociopolitical development in Hume and Spinoza. Spinoza develops a radically revisionary position in the natural law debate, building upon the bold equation of right and power. Hume is best interpreted as offering a skeptical–empirical reworking of traditional natural law theories, which maintains much of the practical purport of these theories, while providing it with a new, metaphysically less firm, but also less problematic, foundation. What the two (...) philosophers have in common is that they formulate realist revisions of the natural law tradition in the light of their more general naturalistic, secular philosophical commitments. Both philosophers, moreover, point to the slow development of man’s insight in the laws of nature, arising through a gradual accumulation of experiential insights. These insights are never wholly ‘liberated’ from the historical and imaginative perspective in which they arise. Accordingly, although rational progress brings the systems of justice and politics of different groups of people closer to each other, they necessarily retain, sometimes fundamentally incompatible, divergences. In the tradition of Machiavellian political realism, therefore, both Spinoza and Hume plead for judging political orders according to their own merits: do they, in their own specific ways, bring about a sufficient degree of order and liberty? (shrink)

This chapter considers the encounter of skepticism with the Kantian and post-Kantian philosophical enterprise and focuses on the intriguing feature whereby it is assimilated into this enterprise. In this period, skepticism becomes interchangeable with its other, which helps understand the proliferation of many kinds of views under its name and which forms the background for transforming skepticism into an anonymous, routine practice of raising objections and counter-objections to one’s own view. German philosophers of this era counterpose skepticism to dogmatism and (...) criticism, ancient to modern skepticism, and, importantly, conceptualize the transitions from one form to another, which forms the conceptual matrix in which new disciplinary forms, such as psychology, anthropology, and historicism contend for cultural-intellectual standing beside philosophy. I present this assimilationist trajectory by reviewing three well-known moments of this encounter of skepticism and idealism: (1) Kant’s idealization of skepticism as a floating position amidst various philosophical positions through the dialectic, polemics, systematics, and history of pure reason; (2) Fichte’s schematic conception of skepticism as a dispute of systems in the early Wissenschaftslehre following his review of the skeptic G. E. Schulze’s attacks on Critical philosophy; (3) Hegel’s historicizing conception of skepticism in the context of differences between subjective idealism and speculative thought and his early Jena review of another work by the same skeptic Schulze. (shrink)

This paper compares the views on compassion in Spinoza, Hume and Schopenhauer. It is shown that even though all three approach compassion with the same aim and from very similar starting-points, all give significantly different accounts of compassion. The differences among the accounts are compared and explained, and it is shown how progress is made in that later accounts avoid certain problems faced by the earlier ones.

In the last part of Ethics Spinoza introduces the doctrine of the intellectual love of God: God loves himself with an infinite intellectual love. This doctrine has raised one of the most discussed puzzles in Spinoza scholarship: How can God have intellectual love if, as Spinoza says, God is Nature itself? After examining existing.approaches to the puzzle and revealing their failures, I will propose a Neo- Confucian approach to the puzzle. I will compare Spinoza's philosophy with Neo-Confucian philosophy and argue (...) that we can develop a new approach to the puzzle by appealing to the comparison. I conclude that the intellectual love of God can be properly understood from different perspectives. From God's perspective it is understood as the creative power of God. From an individual's perspective it is understood as the essence of this very individual. Moreover, once we combine these two perspectives we can reach what I consider to be the correct interpretation of Spinoza' s view: Given that intuitive knowledge and action are one and the same the intellectual love of God should be comprehended not only as man's final fulfillment of freedom through intuitive knowledge, but also as man's self-cultivation in practice. I maintain that a free man, as Spinoza endeavors to become, is equivalent to a Neo-Confucian sage. (shrink)