Lia Levy

Citation:

Levy, L.  2022.  'Ab placito humanum' and the Normativity of Human Laws in the Theological-Political Treatise. Journal of Spinoza Studies. 1(1):62-81. copy at www.tinyurl.com/2b2fncen

Abstract:

The few passages in Spinoza’s work in which he focuses on the concept of human law have not received as much scholarly attention as passages focused on other themes, but they have still been very well examined, as evidenced by, for example, the collection edited by André Campos in 2015, which brought together 21 articles written between 1948 and 2010.It is true that most of these studies do not directly aim to determine whether Spinoza adopts a normative conception of human law in the political-legal field or, if he does adopt such a conception, what the conditions under which he could do so could be, given the logical-causal necessitarianism and naturalism of his metaphysics, explicitly reaffirmed in paragraph 3 of Chapter IV of the TTP. However, this problem is unavoidable, and it is precisely to this matter that I would like to contribute, in a rather modest way, by examining the answer that Spinoza himself offers in the passage just cited.

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