ABSTRACT
Spinoza’s philosophy of political life, presented especially in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and the Tractatus Politicus, is wholly grounded in his immanent metaphysics of Nature. And his Ethics is just as much a study of the metaphysics of bodies, their causal powers and vulnerability, as it is a treatise on human virtue and happiness. Politics, ethics, epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of mind are interwoven in his works, and their interconnections raise possibilities of alternative and richer ways of conceptualising contemporary political and social issues. For Spinoza, minds and bodies are united not in causal interactions but in the relations of ideas to their objects. The theory transforms old Aristotelian doctrines of souls as the forms of living bodies, while also pointing the way to new and still undeveloped possibilities.
