How should we understand ‘philosophy' in Plato’s Republic? Sarah Broadie develops a thoroughly practical notion of the philosopher's activity. Her interpretation helps with the old puzzle about the philosopher's qualification to rule. It also addresses a new problem, namely that Plato ought to have subdivided the rational part of the soul into two parts if the philosophers engage in both theoretical and practical thinking. By conceiving of wisdom in practical terms, Broadie downplays the possible conflict between theory and praxis. I (...) argue that her account of the philosopher's conflict between needing to rule and wanting to theorise does not hold up. Therefore, ‘philosophy’ in the Republic should not be understood in purely practical terms. (shrink)

At the turn of the twentieth century, Helm and Ostwald were the most prominent supporters of so-called ‘energetics’, which aimed to unify all physics by employing the sole concept of energy, without relying on mechanical models. This paper argues that Cassirer's interest in the history of the energy principle and the energetic controversy is entangled with the main themes of his philosophy of physics up to the 1920s: the opposition between the a priori and the a posteriori and the substance-concept (...) and the function-concept. These interwoven motifs are not always easy to disentangle. The paper suggests that Cassirer's interpretation of the energy principle can serve as a guiding thread that runs through Cassirer's philosophy of physics up to the 1920s. (shrink)

This paper presents an original interpretation of the fourteenth-century debate over whether every volitio is a cognitio. This debate, I argue, was at its heart a debate about what constitutes the mark of occurrent mental states. Three participants in this debate – Adam Wodeham, Richard FitzRalph, and John of Ripa – articulated three distinct accounts of the mark of the mental. In doing so, they also developed several philosophical accounts of the intentionality of occurrent affective states.

What is it for a judgement, action, or character state to be itself a good thing, so genuinely worth pursuing? Readers of Plato's Republic discover that that it is by standing in the right relation to the Form of the Good that other things are, or become, good. In her recent monograph, Plato's Sun-Like Good, Sarah Broadie inverts the standard interpretive strategy by focusing primarily on the role of the Good in dialectic, and drawing conclusions about its metaphysical status on (...) that basis. In this paper, I argue that the metaphysically radical features of the Good on her reading – that it is undefinable and not an object of knowledge for the guardians – are ultimately undermined by her full account of the Form, in particular of the way that it endows ‘the things known’ with their reality, as well as relating to its participants as participand. I also argue that her preferred interpretation of the guardians' objects of knowledge in the sun-analogy as action-types is conceptually and textually problematic, and should be rejected in favour of her dispreferred - yet ultimately deeply insightful - interpretation of these objects as Forms that the Good makes known and fully real. (shrink)

Does the Longer Way, described but not taken in Plato's Republic, provide understanding that justice and other virtues are good? Sarah Broadie argues that it does not, on the grounds that Socrates and the brothers learn about justice's goodness without taking the Longer Way. I argue that Socrates’ arguments for justice's goodness are not so complete as to make it impossible for philosopher-rulers to gain from the Longer Way greater understanding of the same point. My main textual evidence is a (...) passage of Book IX (589b–c), a summary that has been widely underappreciated. (shrink)

The idea of ‘Western Philosophy’ is the product of a legitimation project for European colonialism, through to post-second world war Pan-European identity formation and white supremacist projects. Thus argues Ben Kies (1917-1979), a South African public intellectual, schoolteacher, trade unionist, and activist-theorist. In his 1953 address to the Teachers’ League of South Africa, The Contribution of the Non-European Peoples to World Civilisation, Kies became one of the first people to argue explicitly that there is no such thing as ‘Western philosophy’. (...) In this paper, I introduce Kies as a new figure in the historiography of philosophy with important insights, relevant today. I outline his three key arguments: that ‘Western Philosophy’ is the product of political mythmaking, that it is a recent, largely mid-twentieth century fabrication, and that there is an alternative to ‘Histories of Western Philosophy’, namely ‘mixed’ or entangled histories. I show that Kies’ claims are supported both by contemporary scholarship and bibliometric analysis. I thus argue that Kies is right to claim that the idea of a distinctive, hermetically sealed ‘Western Philosophy’ is a recent, political fabrication and should be abandoned. We should instead develop global, entangled historiography to make sense of philosophy and its history today. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Al-Ghazālī’s engagement with scepticism in the Deliverance from Error has received much attention in recent literature, often in the context of comparing him with Descartes. However, there is one curious text that has gone largely unnoticed by commentators. In his account of how he overcame scepticism vis-à-vis a divine light cast unto his heart, al-Ghazālī makes a cryptic claim that suggests that primary truths are inherent to the mind, and that said cognitive status of primary truths is related to (...) his overcoming of scepticism. Although this one text does not straightforwardly prove that al-Ghazālī is a nativist, I argue that there are other texts that plausibly reveal his nativism. As such, I argue that al-Ghazālī can be read as a nativist, and I reconstruct a way in which his nativism helps explain how he overcomes scepticism. In doing so, I defend the (standard) strong divine interventionist reading of al-Ghazālī’s response to scepticism, against Hadisi’s recent weak divine interventionist reading. (shrink)

Timely and immersive, Metaphysical Animals tells the unlikely story of four young women philosophers. Mary Midgley (neé Scrutton), Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Philippa Foot (neé Bosanquet...

Timely and immersive, Metaphysical Animals tells the unlikely story of four young women philosophers. Mary Midgley (neé Scrutton), Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Philippa Foot (neé Bosanquet...

Timely and immersive, Metaphysical Animals tells the unlikely story of four young women philosophers. Mary Midgley (neé Scrutton), Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Philippa Foot (neé Bosanquet...

Conway characterizes freedom in apparently contradictory ways. She describes God as the most free, yet he is necessitated to act perfectly due to his wisdom and goodness. Created beings, by contrast, sin. They are not necessitated to do so. This suggests that Conway has a binary account of freedom: divine freedom is a matter of being necessitated by wisdom and goodness, whereas creaturely freedom consists in indifference, understood as a power to act, or not act. Despite the apparently conflicting remarks, (...) I argue that Conway has a single account of freedom as spontaneity. Conway defines spontaneity in terms of causing one’s own action independent of external causes. I suggest that spontaneity is more precisely understood as an intrinsic power aimed at the good in Conway’s metaphysics, and that this account of freedom can combine necessity and contingency. Rather than a binary, Conway offers an account of freedom in creation that has it on a continuum with divine freedom. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to provide an interpretation for Sartre’s account of the unity of consciousness in The Transcendence of the Ego. I will argue that it is only once The Transcendence of the Ego is read alongside other texts written around the same time, such as The Imaginary, that we can understand how Sartre believes it is possible for consciousness to be unified without an I. I begin by setting out the Kantian context that Sartre develops for (...) his views, before looking at Sartre’s arguments themselves. I then turn to some of the difficulties other readers have encountered with making sense of the arguments of the Transcendence of the Ego. I argue that it is only in relation to Sartre’s account of what he calls the illusion of immanence in The Imaginary, that we can make sense of Sartre’s account of consciousness, before reconstructing what I take to be Sartre’s position drawing on Sartre’s references to Bergson and Spinoza. (shrink)

Leibniz studies is a distinctive kind of joy. The seventeenth-century polymath made remarkable impacts in a wide-ranging number of domains and their subdomains. The attempt to study one domain in d...

Leibniz studies is a distinctive kind of joy. The seventeenth-century polymath made remarkable impacts in a wide-ranging number of domains and their subdomains. The attempt to study one domain in d...

Leibniz studies is a distinctive kind of joy. The seventeenth-century polymath made remarkable impacts in a wide-ranging number of domains and their subdomains. The attempt to study one domain in d...

This paper deals with an important strand of nihilistic arguments to be found in the works of two philosophers who have so far never been studied comparatively: the sophist Gorgias and the Buddhist monk Nāgārjuna. After having reconstructed Gorgias' moves in the first section of On What is Not (Sections 1-4), the paper shows how the nihilist arguments Gorgias uses mostly feature, under a new light, in the philosophy of emptiness developed by Nāgārjuna (Sections 5-8). The paper ends with a (...) hermeneutical suggestion: that is, to replace traditional ‘sceptical’ interpretations of Gorgias and Nāgārjuna with an alternative one, which takes them as possibly committed to nihilism. (shrink)

1. Although there has been renewed interest in Anne Conway’s (1631–1679) sole published philosophical treatise, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, scholars have so far largel...

Michael Frede’s The Historiography of Philosophy, published posthumously thanks to Katerina Ierodiakonou’s diligence, is in a certain way a difficult book. It is a theoretical, non-historically ori...

Michael Frede’s The Historiography of Philosophy, published posthumously thanks to Katerina Ierodiakonou’s diligence, is in a certain way a difficult book. It is a theoretical, non-historically ori...

How Things Are: An Introduction to Buddhist Metaphysics by Mark Siderits is truly a masterly contribution, written by a scholar who has spent his life engaging with the philosophical arguments of S...

Thus the enormous value of a philosophy of life that weakens the feeling for our individuality by constantly referring to universal laws, that teaches us to lose our miniscule selves in the context...

Owen Ware’s Kant’s Justification of Ethics is certainly a worthwhile read for scholars of Kant and normative ethics as well as advanced students of Kant’s practical philosophy. Well-written, concep...

Michael Frede in The Historiography of Philosophy, or in the Nellie Wallace lectures that are the core of the book, addresses a great many issues about the historiography of philosophy. He has thin...

Michael Frede in The Historiography of Philosophy, or in the Nellie Wallace lectures that are the core of the book, addresses a great many issues about the historiography of philosophy. He has thin...

This paper focuses on the narrative aspect of Seneca’s idea of self-transformation. It compares Seneca’s viewpoint with some modern notions of the narrative self to highlight some parallels and significant differences between the ancient and modern conceptions and it establishes the reading of some parts of De Brev. Vit. in the context of other passages as concerned with the narrative self. The paper argues, amongst other points, that in Ep. 83.1–3, Seneca extends the practice of meditatio (ethically directed self-examination) by (...) incorporating the construction of a narrative self into this process, in dual roles, as examiner and examined. It concludes that Seneca expected us to avail ourselves of a similar self-assessment based on a dialogue with philosophical texts. (shrink)

In the last half of the twentieth century, some of the most prominent historians of Philosophy turned their attention to the historiography of the subject. Arguably the most important and most infl...

I argue against a prevailing interpretation of Schopenhauer’s account of inner awareness and world-understanding. Because scholars have typically taken on board the assumption that inner awareness is non-representational, they have concerned themselves in the main with how to transfer this immediate cognition of will in ourselves and apply it to our understanding of the world–as–representation. Some scholars propose that the relation of the world-as-will to the world-as-representation is to be understood in figurative or metaphorical terms. I disagree because, for Schopenhauer, (...) inner awareness reveals a genuine philosophical truth. Some scholars also suggest that it is only via analogical transference that one can interpret the world as having the same inner nature as oneself. I disagree and point out the downside of this suggestion. I use both textual evidence and general philosophical considerations to demonstrate that inner awareness, for Schopenhauer, has a representational dimension. Overlooking this point has led scholars to misconstrue how inner awareness relates to world-understanding. I provide an alternative interpretation against figurative and analogical readings. I propose that, for Schopenhauer, we cognize partially a priori that all things are merely different expressions of the same activity that we are acquainted with in inner awareness. (shrink)

In a programmatic paper from 2005, Daniel Garber writes: “People do histories of all sorts of things, including politics, military strategy, theatre, table manners, corkscrews. Why not a real histo...

1. In the Physics and Metaphysics, Aristotle lays out four kinds of causes and provides examples of each. Bronze and silver are offered as examples of the material causes of artefacts, the father a...

When the University of Glasgow moved to its present location in the 1870s the grand graduation hall, the Bute Hall, was adorned with suitably learned images on its stained glass. One window depicts...

In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle considers friendship an essential component of the good life. After distinguishing between what he calls ‘coincidental’ and ‘complete’ kinds of friendship, he st...

In thirteen chapters, Vrahimis traces the reception of Bergson’s philosophy within the history of analytic philosophy from the beginning of the twentieth century all the way to the late 1950s. The...

1. Carl Christian Erhard Schmid, called one of the “most significant Kantians” (Rosenkranz, Geschichte der Kant’schen Philosophie, 307) of his time, was an influential interpreter of the Critical p...

1. Marx notoriously complained that philosophers before him had sought only to describe the world, rather than to change it.1 Whether or not this is fair to Marx’s immediate predecessors, this is c...

ABSTRACT This paper explores some key features of Medieval accounts of intuition, focusing on Thomas Aquinas (1224/5–1274), on the one hand, and on Duns Scotus (c. 1266-1308), Peter Auriol (c. 1280–1322), and William Ockham (c. 1287-1347), on the other hand. The first section is devoted to the type of intuitive cognition which is accepted by all these authors, namely, the immediate and direct grasp of some present material object by the senses. It is from this basic sensory intuition – they (...) agree – that human cognition starts. The second section turns to intuitive intellectual cognition and to the much greater disagreements which divide these philosophers. Notwithstanding these important differences, the paper’s conclusion draws attention to the similarities in the conception of intuition which cut across the otherwise significantly different accounts of the authors discussed. I end with an invitation to recover their older way of thinking of intuition. (shrink)

What are intuitions? Do they exist as distinctive mental states? Do they have an epistemic function? Can we discern specific features that characterize intuitions? Questions like these are widely d...

During the early modern period, a framework broadly attributable to Descartes sought to establish all knowledge on a foundation of indubitable truths that are fully clear and totally certain: intuitions. A powerful challenge to treating these seemingly unassailable intuitions as epistemic foundations is that the only truths which can be known in this fashion are so obvious and useless that they could not produce any other knowledge. Rationalists typically respond to this worry by maintaining that there are substantive intuitive truths. (...) Other natural options are to maintain that tautologous truths can serve as a fit foundation, or to reject this framework entirely. Empiricists like Locke, Hume, Condillac, and Mill opt for these other solutions. While Locke and Hume offer views that revise and refine this framework, Condillac and Mill engage in more radical departures from it. An interesting result of this difference in approach is that we see Locke and Hume subdividing reason between two domains – one in which intuition reigns, and one which is more properly the domain of the senses – while in Condillac and Mill we see two differing approaches – analysis and induction, respectively – to unifying all human reasoning within a single domain. (shrink)

Later Nyāya philosophers maintain that absences are real particulars, irreducible to any positives, that we perceive. The fourteenth-century Nyāya philosopher Gaṅgeśa argues for a condition on absence perception according to which we always perceive an absence as an absence of its counterpositive, or its corresponding absent object or property. Call this condition the ‘counterpositive condition’. Gaṅgeśa shows that the counterpositive condition is both supported by a plausible thesis about the epistemology of relational properties and motivates the defence of absence as (...) irreducible. But against Gaṅgeśa, the sixteenth-century Nyāya philosopher Raghunātha and his seventeenth-century commentators Bhavānanda, Jagadīśa, and Gadādhara identify cases in which the counterpositive condition fails. In this article, I examine the Nyāya-internal debate over this condition. I conclude that Raghunātha makes a compelling case that the counterpositive condition fails. (shrink)

The book under review here is a thorough and enlightening look at how Berkeley's life and philosophy intertwined. The fact that this review focuses on some points where I disagree with the author s...

The logical rule of contraposition as applied to a particular affirmative proposition (I-contraposition), despite its rejection in the medieval Latin logic, had a different history in the medieval Arabic logic, varying from common acknowledgement to total dismissal (it was accepted by Avicenna and by all of his followers in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and rejected by all of Arabic logicians in the late thirteenth century onwards). This paper is a narrative of the fate of I-contraposition in the early Arabic (...) logic. I will study Avicenna’s, al-Suhrawardī’s, al-Rāzī’s, al-Kashshī’s, and al-Khūnajī’s views on this rule. Although Avicenna explicitly acknowledged I-contraposition in a brief note, and in an apparently Meinongian language, the other four figures found I-contraposition problematic and listed some counterexamples to it. Nonetheless, they all attempted to justify Avicenna’s acceptance of the rule by restricting its application conditions. These efforts led to interesting syntactic and semantic analyses but gathered little attention from later medieval logicians. Finally, in the middle Arabic logic, the revised versions of I-contraposition were also declared invalid. (shrink)

John Rogers (G.A.J. Rogers) died on 26th November 2022 at the age of 84. Professor Emeritus at the University of Keele and a specialist in the history of seventeenth-century philosophy, John was on...

From the title, Interpreting Duns Scotus, one would expect to find in this volume a type of meta-study. By this I mean that each article would reveal as much about the author as about the subject,...

Friedrich Albert Lange is usually regarded as a representative of physiological neo-Kantianism or as a forerunner of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism. In this paper I try to reconstruct Lange’s theory of values to argue that his philosophy is better framed as an intermediate point in the development of the two-world theory (facts/values) between Hermann Lotze and Southwestern neo-Kantianism.

For Hegel, poverty is not simply a misfortune, but, rather, a kind of injury inflicted on one class by another. Though Hegel rejects Marx’s theory of class, he nevertheless anticipates Marx’s idea of the exploitation of one class by another. How, though, do we align this proto-marxist dichotomy between rich and poor with Hegel’s official theory of class; his tripartite theory of estates? I argue that Hegel’s wealthy are chiefly found in the ‘mercantile’ estate, and that they are those intellectual (...) labourers who manage, oversee, and organize the production process. (shrink)

Discussions of Leibniz’s view of the relation between God and nature in 1675–1676 has split commentators into two competing camps. According to some scholars, Leibniz was a pantheistic substance monist in these years. However, other scholars think that he was neither a substance monist nor a pantheist. This paper advocates a middle ground between these two interpretations. With scholars in the first camp, it is argued that Leibniz was a substance monist in 1675–1676. However, it is also argued that he (...) was not a pantheistic substance monist, but rather a panentheistic one. This interpretation has at least a twofold virtue vis-à-vis the anti-monistic and pantheistic readings. For one thing, unlike the anti-monistic reading, the panentheistic interpretation is in keeping with the weight of textual evidence, which strongly indicates that in 1675–1676 Leibniz did embrace, and actually argue for, the idea that God is the only substance. For another, unlike the pantheist interpretation, it can accommodate the fact that, while endorsing monism in 1675–1676, Leibniz at the same time rejected necessitarianism. (shrink)

In NE III.10, 1118b1–3, Aristotle says that the “most shared of the senses is that according to which intemperance [comes about], and it would seem justifiably to be shameful, because it inheres [in us] not insofar as we are human beings, but insofar as we are animals”. This statement appears to describe the sense of touch as shameful. This may seem like a strange position for Aristotle to hold, since elsewhere he describes human touch as the most accurate among animal (...) species, which corresponds to our superior intelligence, and as necessary for animal life. In this paper, I argue that Maimonides nevertheless succeeds in showing that Aristotle has a strong theoretical reason for maintaining that the sense of touch is shameful. Maimonides shows that, based on principles of Aristotelian psychology, human touch is indeed shameful because it obstructs intellectual activity. (shrink)

In the early twentieth century, many philosophers in America thought that time should be taken seriously in one way or another. George P. Adams (1882-1961) argued that the past, present and future are all real but only the present is actual. I call this theory ‘actualist eternalism’. In this paper, I articulate his novel brand of eternalism as one piece of his metaphysical system and I explain how he argued for the view in light of the best explanations of temporal (...) experience and the present. I argue that his exploitation of analogies between time and modality offer some lessons for current debates about time such as the importance of providing a temporal epistemology. I also extract what I call the temporal boundary problem and argue that it gives rise to an unaddressed challenge for presentists and growing block theorists. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Leaving to one side McTaggart’s notorious proof of the unreality of time, this paper examines his positive account of the way in which reality, thus judged to be timeless, misleadingly appears to us as temporal, something which has been almost entirely ignored in the literature. The paper first examines his complex motivations in taking up the issue. It next considers an early unsuccessful approach, before expounding the details of its complex replacement as set out in McTaggart’s magnum opus, The (...) Nature of Existence. The paper concludes with a consideration of how such endeavours in constructive metaphysics ought best to be evaluated. (shrink)

This paper develops the account of our experience and knowledge of time put forward by Russell in his Theory of Knowledge manuscript. While Russell ultimately abandons the project after it receives severe criticism from Wittgenstein (though several chapters derived from it appear as articles in The Monist), in producing this manuscript time, and particularly the notion of the present time, play a central role in Russell’s account of experience. In the present discussion, I propose to focus largely on Russell’s writing (...) in 1912–3, comparing this with some of the remarks made about memory by Moore in 1910–11. My motivation is twofold. First as a matter of scholarship, to reveal an original interpretation of Russell’s notion of immediate memory and of his view of our experience and knowledge of time over this period. Second as a matter of philosophical curiosity. There has been an increase in interest in temporal experience in contemporary discussions of the philosophy of mind, from memory and the imagination to the temporal aspects of perceptual experience. Russell’s writing in 1912–3 provides us with a philosophically interesting account of temporal experience which has points of contact with contemporary debates. (shrink)

This paper develops the account of our experience and knowledge of time put forward by Russell in his Theory of Knowledge manuscript. While Russell ultimately abandons the project after it receives severe criticism from Wittgenstein (though several chapters derived from it appear as articles in The Monist), in producing this manuscript time, and particularly the notion of the present time, play a central role in Russell’s account of experience. In the present discussion, I propose to focus largely on Russell’s writing (...) in 1912–3, comparing this with some of the remarks made about memory by Moore in 1910–11. My motivation is twofold. First as a matter of scholarship, to reveal an original interpretation of Russell’s notion of immediate memory and of his view of our experience and knowledge of time over this period. Second as a matter of philosophical curiosity. There has been an increase in interest in temporal experience in contemporary discussions of the philosophy of mind, from memory and the imagination to the temporal aspects of perceptual experience. Russell’s writing in 1912–3 provides us with a philosophically interesting account of temporal experience which has points of contact with contemporary debates. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In American-British philosophy around the turn of the twentieth century, every philosopher and their dog had something to say on time. Thinkers worried about our experience of time, and the metaphysics of time. This introduction to the special issue, Time in American-British Philosophy 1880s-1930s, investigates that obsession, explaining how its philosophers spilled pints of ink on time, and produced the first-ever surveys of time. I historically contextualise their work and explore some of its driving causes, including experimental psychology of (...) time perception, and theological worries over evolution. This article concludes by surveying the rich, wide-ranging papers within this collection, covering time in Shadworth Hodgson, William James, Mary Calkins, Victoria Welby, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, A. A. Robb, Alfred North Whitehead, Norman Kemp Smith, J. M. E. McTaggart, Karin Costelloe-Stephen, Hilda Oakeley, May Sinclair, and George P. Adams. (shrink)

Franklin Perkins' newest book is written for a general audience with little or no background in the Chinese intellectual tradition and it purports to introduce readers to the philosophical views of the third century BCE Confucian thinker Mengzi.

Many anglophone scholars take the early Confucians to be virtue ethicists of one kind or another. A common virtue ethical reading of one of the most influential early Confucians, namely Mengzi, ascribes to him the view that moral actions are partly (or entirely) moral because of the state from which they are performed, be it the agent’s motives, emotions, or their character traits. I consider whether such a reading of the Mengzi is justified and I argue that it is not. (...) I argue that there is no reason to believe that Mengzi distinguishes the moral value of actions that are performed from virtuous and non-virtuous states. Given this, virtue (as a feature of agents) is normatively posterior to virtuous actions. I conclude, first, that this poses a challenge to a wide range of common interpretations of the Mengzi, be they virtue ethical or otherwise, and second, that there might be conceptual space for an account of virtue ethics that rejects the normative priority of virtue over virtuous actions. (shrink)

“I am only what I make myself to be”, Fichte tells us. In this paper, I outline Fichte’s views on sex, marriage and gender, with two aims. Firstly, to elucidate an aspect of his moral theory which has received little attention, and secondly to argue that Fichte’s distinctive stance on selfhood, freedom, and normativity lead to a revisionary account of gender expression and identity, where people can freely carve out their own identity, irrespective of “nature”. In this paper, I therefore (...) outline Fichte’s own views, highlighting what I see as a tension in the texts between essentialism and antiessentialism about gender, before reconstructing a neo-Fichtean view which foregrounds the anti-essentialist aspect. (shrink)

Spinoza’s views on friendship have been a relatively overlooked aspect of his ethical thought. Even though commentators such as Andrew Youpa and Steven Nadler shed significant light on the significance of Spinoza’s views, they do not provide a detailed examination of the possibility of friendship between people who are not similar to one another. In considering to what extent (if at all) a virtuous person can join ordinary people who are dissimilar to her in friendship, my paper attempts to reach (...) a better understanding of the limits, as well as the power, of friendship for Spinoza. First, I show that we can make a meaningful distinction between two kinds of friendship, which I call active friendship and coincidental friendship. Then, I argue that in Spinoza besides these two kinds of friendships, there is also a group of social interactions wherein the virtuous wants to bring the non-virtuous to enlightenment. In examining the nature of these interactions, I conclude that in Spinoza in addition to what we can call the Socratic quest of bringing people to enlightenment, we also find a strategy of insulation, which consists in taking measures so that ordinary people do not pose a threat to the virtuous. -/- . (shrink)