Medicine in Spinoza's Ethics

• Grant number: 24/09094-2
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: November 01, 2024
• End date: October 31, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy - Ethics
• Principal Investigator: Luís César Guimarães Oliva
• Grantee: Felipe Bellei Cordeiro
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The hypothesis of the research is that Spinoza's Ethics can be read as a work of Hippocratic inspiration. Our goal will be to highlight the presence of the medical method in its constitution. This implies two pertinences: 1) Spinoza's placement within the tradition of interpenetration between medicine and philosophy and 2) the medical method within the Ethics itself. In this project, we start from the birth of medicine as tékhne iatrike (the art of healing/caring) with the Hippocratic Greeks, through the incorporation of its method into the history of philosophy. Hippocratic medicine arises from the existence of pre-Socratic philosophy, which systematized the study of nature (physis). Physis is the central ordering principle from which all medical tékhne springs, giving it the form of its lógos and praxis: the physician is an apprentice and assistant to a physis that heals itself. In Plato, medical tékhne serves as a methodological model for the emerging discipline, philosophy, which should proceed with the psyche in the analytical manner that Hippocrates proceeds with the body. Aristotle uses tékhne as a methodological model for his Nicomachean Ethics. Cicero equates them, defining philosophy as the medicine of the soul. In Spinoza, as argued by Chaui (2020), we see the incorporation of the medical method in the construction of the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect. We want to advance the interpretative hypothesis that Spinoza retraces the path that Greek medicine takes in its formation. In the Ethics, as in the Hippocratic works, it is from the ordering of nature that a method for salvation (salus) arises: our hypothesis is that the diagnosis and therapy twinned in the Ethics are designed from the condition of double causality (internal and external) that is characteristic of human nature; on this basis, we will explore the diagnosis of submission to passions as illness and the hypothesis of the internalization of causality as therapy.