Spinoza's ontology in the tension between eternity and history

• Grant number: 09/15615-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: May 01, 2010
• End date: April 30, 2012
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy - History of Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Marilena de Souza Chauí
• Grantee: Mariana Cecilia de Gainza
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 07/56080-1 - Rupture and continuity: research on the relations between nature and history since the great rationalism of the seventeenth Century, AP.TEM

Abstract

In our doctoral research, we identified and criticized the central elements of Hegel's interpretation of Spinoza, which are responsible of the dominance, in the History of Philosophy, of an idealistic or intellectualist understanding of Spinoza's thought. In order to make a critic of such reading, we focused on the fundamental controversial subject: How to think singularity and history in a philosophy of immanence, based on the statement of the eternal existence of a unique infinite substance? Our doctoral research analyzed the first topic, the determination of the singular: "How should we conceive the singular things in a philosophy of positive infinite?” Our postdoctoral research has to explore the second component of that general problem: "How should we conceive the history in a philosophy of eternity?” Spinoza's construction of immanence, considered as an ontology which accomplishes a critic of certain dominant ways of understanding the relations between whole and parts, unity and multiplicity, identity and difference, infinite and finite (ontology that constitutes, then, the place of a conceptual dislocation that allows an effective critic to the idealism), must be revise, now, in its potential to reflect on history. (AU)