11. Points for discussion and a role-play:

1. Discuss your points of view on Machiavelli’s approach to politics. Express your

own ideas and give a sound grounding.

2. Imagine you are a sole Ruler of Fantasia (non-existent country). Speak on the

course of political actions, You would follow, to achieve the compliance within the society.

3. Do we need particular conditions for bringing up just men? Analyze and discuss

the traits of character of contemporary youth. Is it possible to bring just men in the contemporary society?

4. What problem is stated in the following saying of Max Weber: «No ethics in the

world can ignore the fact that achieving “good” objectives in the majority of cases is connected with the need to put up with both using doubtful and at least dangerous means and the possibility of negative side effects; no ethics in the world can say when and in what volume ethically positive objective “sanctifies” ethically dangerous means and consequences?” Does Weber’s position coincide with Machiavelli’s point of view? Give your reasoning.

12. Test your logic

Holmes had been introduced to four musicians: two men, Frank and Harold. And two women, Ethel and Georgina.

One played the French horn, another the cymbals, the third was a trumpeter and the fourth, like Holmes, a violinist. All four were seated at a square table.

1. The person who sat across from Frank played the french horn.

2. The person who sat across from Harold was not the trumpeter.

3. The person who sat on Ethel’s left played the cymbals.

4. The person on Georgina’s left was not the violinist.

5. The trumpeter and the violinist were brother and sister.

CAN YOU IDENTIFY THE MUSICIAN WHO PLAYED THE SAME INSTRUMENT AS HOLMES?

13. Summarize the text in a paragraph of about 200 words.

UNIT 5

Spinoza

Learn the topical vocabulary:

направлениe	trend	современный	contemporary
незаурядный	remarkable	воображение	imagination
сравнительный	comparative	недостаток	shortcoming
взаимодействие	interaction	подчеркивать	underline
решающий	decisive	сводиться к	add up to

Pre-text activities:

1. What are the main sources of a man’s knowledge about the external world and about him/herself?

2. What are the peculiarities of rational cognition (knowledge)?

3. What is sensible perception? What are its forms?

1.Read and translate the text:

Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677) has been a figure of some notoriety in the history of Western philosophy. Spinoza’s thought had influence on both the development of the dominant streams in modern academic philosophy and of his contemporary. For example, his treatment of the mind as idea of the body – expressing in thought the same reality that is expressed also by the body – has posed important challenges to modern philosophical classifications of views on the mind-body relation. European commentary too has emphasized other aspects of Spinoza’s philosophy – highlighting especially his integration of reason, emotion and imagination and the dynamic character of his treatment of individuality and of collective power.

Among Spinoza’s early writings are the unfinished “Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect” and “The Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-being”, which deals with many of the themes of the later and better known “Ethics”, and exhibits the integration of metaphysical and ethical concerns which is a distinctive feature of Spinoza’s mature philosophy.

“The Ethics” was written over an extended period and commentators have emphasized the significance for the character of this work of its interruption by the more directly political concerns of “The Tractatus Theologico Politics”. It resulted in a novel integration of abstract definitions of metaphysical concepts such as substance, attributes and modes with reflection on ideas of freedom, virtue and the eternity of the mind. Spinoza’s other political work “The Political Treatise”, in which he addresses the comparative flaws and virtues of different systems of government, was unfinished at the time of his death.

Although much of Spinoza’s philosophy developed out of the work of his fellow rationalist, Descartes, it also incorporates elements from ancient and medieval philosophy – from Aristotle, the Stoics and Maimonides – as well as from another of his contemporaries, Thomas Hobbes. But Spinoza creatively transformed his sources into radically new and often unsettling ideas. His originality as a philosopher is expressed in this extraordinary capacity to adapt old concepts and themes to yield new and controversial theses.

Some of the most important and vexed issues posed by Spinoza’s philosophy concern his treatment of the relations between “inadequate” and “adequate” knowledge, and especially of the relations between reason and imagination. Spinoza’s treatment of imagination as involving bodily awareness is not in itself novel. But his treatment of body as an attribute of substance – and hence as of equal metaphysical status to mind – gives imagination a new importance. Both imagination and reason are grounded in the complex structure of the human body, which allows it to retain traces of past interactions with other bodies. The mind thus has, simultaneously with ideas of what is currently happening in the body, ideas of what has previously happened: and this makes possible the comparison of different ideas.

Spinoza’s treatment of imagination underlies important connections between “The Ethics” and the political writings. His discussion of prophecy in “The Tractatus Theologico Politics”, for example, is connected, through the treatment of imagination, with his more directly political concerns. The prophets, he argues, are gifted not with superior intellects but with vivid imaginations. The operations of imagination involved in prophecy are mediated through historical circumstances and cultural limitations. So the ideal life of reason is counterpoised to the lives of “the multitude”, who are governed not by reason but by the passions, especially fear and hope. But the power of reason over imagination and the passions centers for Spinoza on its capacity to understand their operations in individual and social life. Understanding the passions is the path to freedom and virtue.

Freedom for Spinoza resides not in a faculty of free will – able to control the non-rational – but in understanding the necessities that govern human beings as part of nature. The belief in human free will is an illusion arising from ignorance of the causes of our actions: and the belief in divine purpose is a retreat to the “sanctuary of ignorance”.

It is a distinctive feature of Spinoza’s version of rationalism that he commits himself to a form of knowledge higher than reason. Reason is superior to imagination, but is itself inferior to “intuitive knowledge”. The highest form of knowledge is distinguished from reason by its capacity to take things in “one glance”, and by the fact that it understands things in relation to God. Through intuitive knowledge, the mind understands things in relation to substance, on which they depend, and in doing so it understands itself as eternal. The doctrine of the eternity of the mind unfolds in the concluding sections of “The Ethics”. These passages illuminate the interactions between reason, imagination and emotion in Spinoza’s version of wisdom.