Research

Paper: Spinoza, Love, Eternal Minds, and Grief

I have a paper in the Journal of Modern Philosophy on Spinoza’s accounts of the mind eternality, love, and knowledge. You can find it here. The thesis is that Spinoza’s system lets us to keep a loved one “with us,” so to speak, after their death. This is done by increasing knowledge of the loved one’s eternal “something” (as Spinoza calls it) during their life, and then reflecting on this knowledge once they have passed. I further argue that doing this is a Spinozistic good, wherein our joy is preserved or strengthened.

Paper: Spinoza and Suicide Research

I have a paper in the Journal of Spinoza Studies on Baruch Spinoza’s philosophy of suicide, and how it can encourage better practices in contemporary suicide research. You can find it here. This paper resolves remaining tensions in Spinoza’s views of suicide, suggesting that he thinks that, in some cases, suicides can be rational, before briefly applying Spinoza’s views to questions about contemporary suicide research.

Dissertation: Spinoza, Social Ontology, and Social Power

My dissertation is on Spinoza’s metaphysics of the human and his social ontology and how it informs his applied social philosophy. I have chapters on the nature of social groups understood as extended, contiguous bodies, on how Spinoza’s view of the power of the minds of social groups informs us of his views of knowledge generally, on how his discussion of social restraints on power can be seen as a unique form of epistemic injustice, and on how his politics reveals a concern for people’s causal powers.