CFP: Spinoza and Imaginative Ideas

Spinoza’s fame as an arch-rationalist belies the attention he devotes to forms of cognition besides reason—to the imagination, including our ideas acquired through the senses, or by testimony. Though he calls these ‘inadequate’, ‘partial’, ‘confused’, even ‘mutilated’, Spinoza also makes clear that they play a key role in our emotional lives, in prevalent forms of social and political organization, and even in our capacity as knowers. While some aspects of imagination, such as its ability to give rise to confused and perspectival representations and associations of affects playing an important social or political role, have received ample discussion, we believe that there are still plenty of underexplored questions, including: How do ideas of the imagination acquire their content? What is their relation to truth, falsity, error? What is their status—ontological, doxastic, affective—vis-à-vis ideas of reason? Can we rid ourselves of our imaginative ideas? Should we even try?

The ‘Spinoza and Imaginative Ideas’ workshop will take place on October 24-25 in Berlin, at the Human Abilities Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Freie Universität). We invite prospective participants to send an anonymized abstract of no more than 300 words by 11:59CET on July 1 to the following email address: [email protected]. These should be formatted for a 25–30-minute presentation. We will aim to communicate our decisions by July 21. Please, indicate your name, university affiliation, and the title of your paper in the body of your email message. We especially encourage submissions from women and members of underrepresented groups (you may disclose preferred pronouns in your submission email). Unfortunately, no financial assistance can be provided to support travel expenses and accommodation for participants. The keynote speakers of the workshop will be Ursula Renz (University of Graz), Kristin Primus (University of California Berkeley), Martin Lenz (FernUniversität Hagen), and Eric Schliesser (University of Amsterdam).