Papers by Andrea Sangiacomo
Mindfulness, 2024
This paper investigates the embodied dimension of liberation (vimutti) in the Pāli discourses of ... more This paper investigates the embodied dimension of liberation (vimutti) in the Pāli discourses of the Buddha. Liberation is to be understood in relation to different kinds of "persons"' who experience reality in different ways. For the ordinary person, there might be a presumption of being free, but there is actually no experience of liberation. For the disciple in training, liberation starts to become real and shows itself to be different to the ordinary person's way of life. Eventually, for the awakened disciple, the ordinary way of life is entirely left behind. This does not necessarily entail an escape from the world of embodied life, but it does open new possibilities for choice and freedom in the overall psychophysical and social ecosystem. In all these cases, liberation (or its lack thereof) must be understood from a relational perspective, namely, in connection with how one functions and behaves in relation to other living beings.
Reading Descartes Edited by Andrea Strazzoni, Marco Sgarbi, 2023
Consciousness is connected with the fact that a subject is aware and open to the manifestation of... more Consciousness is connected with the fact that a subject is aware and open to the manifestation of whatever appears. Existence, by contrast, is used to express the fact that something is given in experience, is present, or is real. Usually, the two notions are taken to be somehow related. This chapter suggests that existence is at best introduced as a metaphysical (or meta-experiential) concept that inevitably escapes the domain of conscious experience. In order to illustrate this claim, two case studies are considered. The first case is provided by Descartes's famous treatment of consciousness and existence in his Meditations on First Philosophy. The second case is meant to contrast the Cartesian approach by taking the opposite route, as delineated by Emanuele Severino (1929-2020) in his "fundamental ontology."
Journal of Historical Network Research, 2022
How could one create a network representation of a book corpus spanning over two hundred years? I... more How could one create a network representation of a book corpus spanning over two hundred years? In this paper, we present a method based on text data vectorization for a complex and multifaceted network representation of an early modern corpus of 239 natural philosophy textbooks published in Latin, French, and English. On the one hand, we use unsupervised methods (namely topic modeling, term frequency – inverse document frequency, and multilingual word embeddings) to represent the broader features of this corpus, such as the homogeneity in the style and linguistic usages, both among works written in the same language, and across multiple languages. On the other hand, we use the collocate analysis of specific keywords to explore how certain concepts were understood, reshaped, and disseminated in the corpus. We call this the ‘semantic dimension.’ Each of these two dimensions provides a different way of correlating the books via text data vectorization and representing them as a network. Since each of these dimensions is in itself complex and multifaceted, the network we construct for each of them is a multiplex one, made of several layer-graphs. Furthermore, provided that there is enough information available about the authors of the works included in our inventory, this research offers the grounds for further expanding the described network representation in such a way as to create a third multiplex, one that explores some of the social features of the authors in question.
Blackwell companion to Spinoza, ed. by Y. Melamed, 2021
Spinoza on how passions create the self and the others mamety aham iti kṣīṇe bahirdhādhyātmam eva... more Spinoza on how passions create the self and the others mamety aham iti kṣīṇe bahirdhādhyātmam eva ca | nirudhyata upādānaṃ tatkṣayāj janmanaḥ kṣayaḥ. || Once the sense of 'I' and 'mine', both internal and external, are extinguished, | attachment ceases, and when this happens birth is destroyed. || Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, 18.4 1. Deconstructing the self In the third part of the Ethics, Spinoza provides a naturalistic picture of human psychology. Individuals exist in a complex network of causes. Insofar as the individual and the external causes agree in nature and cooperate to bring about mutually compatible effects, the individual's own conatus is enhanced by the external causes and the individual's power of acting is increased (producing affects of joy)-otherwise it decreases (producing affects of sadness). According to Spinoza, the complexity of human emotional life can be reduced to different (and increasingly more complex) combinations and permutations of these three fundamental affects: joy, sadness, and desire. Spinoza's account distinguishes between active and passive affects. For the purposes of this discussion, only passive affects are considered (concerning this distinction see James (1997), Sangiacomo (2019); for a general account of Spinoza's theory of affects, see Macherey (1995), Jaquet (2004)). This chapter discusses how Spinoza's theory of affects demonstrates that the self with which human individuals identify in daily life is the result of a complex and constantly ongoing imaginative construction shaped by desires and causal interactions with other individuals and external causes. Recent scholarship emphasises the socially constructed nature of the self in Spinoza's moral psychology (see, e.g. Armstrong (2009), Kisner (2011) and essays in Armstrong, Green and Sangiacomo eds. (2019)). Given the space constraints, the chapter does not investigate further ramifications that this thesis has for Spinoza's metaphysics and ethics (e.g. whether there can also be an adequate idea of a 'self'). There are two salient features of the self that individuals commonly experience in daily life: (1) the self appears to have some persistence over time, and (2) the self is a centre of control that in Y. Melamed (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Spinoza, forthcoming 2020
University of Groningen Press, 2022
Friendliness (mettā in Pāli) is an emotional and intentional attitude of goodwill and non-aversio... more Friendliness (mettā in Pāli) is an emotional and intentional attitude of goodwill and non-aversion towards all sentient beings, including oneself. It is rooted in both feeling and understanding. In the Pāli discourses of the Buddha, friendliness is repeatedly stressed and encouraged for its numerous benefits. It supports and develops a form of emotional intelligence and provides an ideal pathway to explore deeper aspects of one’s experience and their philosophical implications. Friendliness is best understood not in isolation, but rather in the broader context of the Buddha’s teaching. In that context, it plays an essential role as a catalyst for the unfolding of the whole Buddhist path. Friendliness, then, can be a particularly interesting thread to follow in order to unpack the meaning and practical implications of the core teachings conveyed in the discourses. This introduction combines meditation practice, philosophy, and the reading of ancient texts in order to show how friendliness can function both as an entry point to explore the landscape of the discourses, and how that same landscape unfolds from the perspective disclosed by friendliness.
British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 2022
This paper seeks to reconstruct the meaning of existence in the Pāli discourses of the Buddha by ... more This paper seeks to reconstruct the meaning of existence in the Pāli discourses of the Buddha by considering how the notion is used in the most systematic contexts in which it appears, and how it could be best interpreted. The discourses are concerned with how existence is used to support and
consolidate a certain attitude of ownership, appropriation, and entitlement
over contents of experience, in virtue of which one can claim that this or that
is ‘mine’. The problem with this move is that it seems to require a degree of
stability that is at odds with the fundamental uncertainty (anicca) of all
conditioned realities. Existence is used to somehow cover up uncertainty, and thus allow for a semblance of genuine ownership and possession, while in fact possession and ownership are just deluded views doomed to be
contradicted by the structural uncertainty of actual experience. This reading
entails that the early discourses do share with later traditions an anti-realist
inspiration, which is worth exploring in its own right.
Annals of Science, 2021
Although natural philosophy underwent dramatic transformations during the seventeenth and eightee... more Although natural philosophy underwent dramatic transformations during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, studying its evolution as a whole remains problematic. In this paper, we present a method that integrates traditional reading and computational tools in order to distil from different resources (the four existing Dictionaries of early modern philosophers and WorldCat) a representative corpus (consisting of 2,535 titles published in Latin, French, English, and German) for mapping the evolution of natural philosophy. In particular, we focus on gathering authors and works that were (directly or indirectly) engaged with the teaching of natural philosophy in the early modern academic milieu. We offer a preliminary assessment of the relevance of our corpus by investigating one aspect of this evolution, namely the trends in the acknowledgments of authorities linked with different and competing approaches to natural philosophy (scholastic, Cartesian, and Newtonian). Our results not only corroborate existing knowledge, but they also show distinctive features and differences within these trends that were not observed previously, thus illustrating the heuristic potential of our computational method for corpus collection.
History of Universities, 2020
This contribution investigates whether it possible to derive a new narrative about the transforma... more This contribution investigates whether it possible to derive a new narrative about the transformation of early modern natural philosophy from the way in which natural philosophy was systematized in academic textbooks and publications. The contribution introduces the notion of ‘normalisation’ as a way of studying and explaining conceptual changes during relatively long periods of time. Normalisation concerns the mutual adaptation of certain ideas and existing traditions. The contribution provides the methodological underpinnings of this account of normalisation and offers a preliminary implementation of it by focusing on the role of ‘occasional causality’ in natural philosophy. To do so, four authors are considered: Pierre Sylvain Régis (1632-1707), Johann Christoph Sturm (1635-1703), Petrus van Musschenbroek (1692-1761), and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). These four authors progressively normalise an account of ‘occasional causality’. The reason why occasional causality is normalised is because it is most conducive, in the early modern scenario, to preserving (under a different guise) a fundamental ontological commitment to the coarse-grained nature of reality, which all four authors are extremely recalcitrant to abandon. This preliminary conclusion shows that studying normalisation may open up a new way of understanding the evolution of early modern natural philosophy.
InCircolo, 2020
In the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, Spinoza presents the knowledge of God as the ... more In the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, Spinoza presents the knowledge of God as the Supreme Good, and this is because he sees this knowledge as the only possible source for a continuous and eternal joy. Spinoza will never change his mind about the intuition that only the knowledge of God can provide eternal joy, and he will remain faithful to this understanding of the Supreme Good and its supreme desirability. The following reflections are devoted to exploring in detail Spinoza's motivations in the Treatise. The purpose is to uncover the mistake that undermines Spinoza's overall solution to the problem he faces, and ultimately affects the main goal of his philosophical project. The mistake can be spelled out quite straightforwardly: no affect (including love and joy) can be eternal. The most interesting aspect of this mistake is not what it affirms, but the reasons behind it that pushed Spinoza to blindly embrace it for his whole life. Bringing into relief this mistake is not a way of dismissing Spinoza's philosophy. On the contrary, a great thinker is one who makes great mistakes, and from them much can be learned.
http://www.incircolorivistafilosofica.it/nietzsche-umanista/
Giornale di metafisica, 2020
Giornale di Metafisica, 2021
Sangiacomo A., 2020, “La virtù secondo Aristotele e Spinoza: appunti per un confronto”, in France... more Sangiacomo A., 2020, “La virtù secondo Aristotele e Spinoza: appunti per un confronto”, in Francesco Camera, Elisabetta Colagrossi, Edoardo Simonotti (eds.), Emozioni, affetti, sentimenti: tra natura e libertà, Milano: Mimesis, pp. 101-119. [Here proofs version]
Science in Context, 2018
This paper argues that Samuel Clarke's account of agent causation (i) provides a philosophical ba... more This paper argues that Samuel Clarke's account of agent causation (i) provides a philosophical basis for moderate voluntarism, and (ii) both leads to and benefits from the acceptance of partial occasionalism as a model of causation for material beings. Clarke's account of agent causation entails that for an agent to be properly called an agent (i.e. causally efficacious), it is essential that the agent is free to choose whether to act or not. This freedom is compatible with the existence of conceptually necessary connections. Hence, Clarke can harmonize God's freedom of choosing with the existence of eternal and necessary relations among things. Moreover, in Clarke's account, only intelligent entities can be properly understood as efficacious causes. Beings deprived of intelligence are not agents or efficacious causes at all and their effects are thus the result of the immediate action of some intelligent being operating upon them.
Oxford Handbook of Descartes and Cartesianism, 2019
Journal of the History of Philosophy
This paper presents the first systematic investigation into Johann Christoph Sturm's natural phil... more This paper presents the first systematic investigation into Johann Christoph Sturm's natural philosophy and his account of causation and scientific explanations. While Sturm maintains that God is the only true cause of natural effects, he also claims that the specificity of natural effects must be empirically investigated by inquiring into natural forms. Forms, however, do not have any active role in the causal process that brings the phenomenon about, but they only account for its specific features. To articulate this view, Sturm engages with a number of crucial topics discussed by seventeenth-century authors, such as the rejection of scholastic substantial forms and the occasionalist claim that only God is the true efficacious cause of natural effects. Sturm's account departs significantly from other currently available early modern positions and offers a still largely overlooked perspective to investigate the seventeenth-century debate on causation. <ext> We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown. T. S. Eliot, The LoveSong of J. Alfred Prufrock </ext>
British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 2018
The ‘model approach’ facilitates a quantitative-oriented study of conceptual changes in large cor... more The ‘model approach’ facilitates a quantitative-oriented study of conceptual changes in large corpora. This paper implements the ‘model approach’ to investigate the erosion of the traditional art-nature distinction in early modern natural philosophy. I argue that a condition for this transformation has to be located in the late scholastic conception of final causation. I design a conceptual model to capture the art-nature distinction and formulate a working hypothesis about its early modern fate. I test my hypothesis on a selected corpus of 25 works published in the Dutch academic milieu between 1607 and 1748. I analyse the corpus through a procedure based on concordancing of keywords associated with the model. I argue that the results obtained constitute a successful pilot study for the implementation of the model approach on larger-scale research.
Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy (Forthcoming), 2018
In this paper, I argue that Kant's New Elucidation (1755) is an important source for better under... more In this paper, I argue that Kant's New Elucidation (1755) is an important source for better understanding how early modern debates managed to import and adapt the notion of sine qua non causation in the domain of natural philosophy. In order to clarify Kant's position, I focus on two preliminary historical moments: the marginalization of sine qua non causation in Suárez's account of efficient causation and the forceful revival of sine qua non causation in Malebranche's occasionalism. In the New Elucidation Kant adopts an understanding of causation similar to that of Malebranche, while also clarifying the way in which God's involvement in nature has to be understood. In so doing, Kant takes issue with some of the ambiguities of Malebranche's own account and that were hotly debated by his contemporaries.
Southern Journal of Philosophy, accepted November 2017.
This paper argues that God's immanent causation and Spinoza's account of activity as adequate cau... more This paper argues that God's immanent causation and Spinoza's account of activity as adequate causation (of finite modes) do not always go together in Spinoza's thought. We show that there is good reason to doubt that this is the case in Spinoza's early Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-being. In the Short Treatise, Spinoza defends an account of God's immanent causation without fully endorsing the account of activity as adequate causation that he will later introduce in the Ethics (E3def2). We turn to an examination of how God's immanent causation relates to the activity of finite things in the Ethics. We consider two ways to think about the link between God, seen as immanent cause, and the activity of finite things: namely, in terms of entailment; and in terms of production. We argue that the productive model is most promising for understanding the way in which the activity of finite things and God's immanent causality are connected in Spinoza's (mature) philosophy 1. Rethinking the activity of finite modes An immensely important strand of the Ethics is the call to be active; the more active one is, the less passive one is, and thus the more freedom and happiness one shall gain. Spinoza argues that increasing our activity will lead us to be more rational and self-aware, thus enabling us to achieve a higher degree of freedom by acting out of our own nature, rather than being affected and constrained by external forces (E4 appendix, iii, v). Indeed, maximizing our activity and thus our knowledge of God or nature is the only path to true salvation, i.e., a kind of salvation not fraught with superstition, delusion, and wishful thinking. 25
Southern Journal of Philosophy - accepted nov. 2017
This paper argues that God's immanent causation and Spinoza's account of activity as adequate cau... more This paper argues that God's immanent causation and Spinoza's account of activity as adequate causation (of finite modes) do not always go together in Spinoza's thought. We show that there is good reason to doubt that this is the case in Spinoza's early Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-being. In the Short Treatise, Spinoza defends an account of God's immanent causation without fully endorsing the account of activity as adequate causation that he will later introduce in the Ethics (E3def2). We turn to an examination of how God's immanent causation relates to the activity of finite things in the Ethics. We consider two ways to think about the link between God, seen as immanent cause, and the activity of finite things: namely, in terms of entailment; and in terms of production. We argue that the productive model is most promising for understanding the way in which the activity of finite things and God's immanent causality are connected in Spinoza's (mature) philosophy 1. Rethinking the activity of finite modes An immensely important strand of the Ethics is the call to be active; the more active one is, the less passive one is, and thus the more freedom and happiness one shall gain. Spinoza argues that increasing our activity will lead us to be more rational and self-aware, thus enabling us to achieve a higher degree of freedom by acting out of our own nature, rather than being affected and constrained by external forces (E4 appendix, iii, v). Indeed, maximizing our activity and thus our knowledge of God or nature is the only path to true salvation, i.e., a kind of salvation not fraught with superstition, delusion, and wishful thinking. 25
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Papers by Andrea Sangiacomo
consolidate a certain attitude of ownership, appropriation, and entitlement
over contents of experience, in virtue of which one can claim that this or that
is ‘mine’. The problem with this move is that it seems to require a degree of
stability that is at odds with the fundamental uncertainty (anicca) of all
conditioned realities. Existence is used to somehow cover up uncertainty, and thus allow for a semblance of genuine ownership and possession, while in fact possession and ownership are just deluded views doomed to be
contradicted by the structural uncertainty of actual experience. This reading
entails that the early discourses do share with later traditions an anti-realist
inspiration, which is worth exploring in its own right.
http://www.incircolorivistafilosofica.it/nietzsche-umanista/
consolidate a certain attitude of ownership, appropriation, and entitlement
over contents of experience, in virtue of which one can claim that this or that
is ‘mine’. The problem with this move is that it seems to require a degree of
stability that is at odds with the fundamental uncertainty (anicca) of all
conditioned realities. Existence is used to somehow cover up uncertainty, and thus allow for a semblance of genuine ownership and possession, while in fact possession and ownership are just deluded views doomed to be
contradicted by the structural uncertainty of actual experience. This reading
entails that the early discourses do share with later traditions an anti-realist
inspiration, which is worth exploring in its own right.
http://www.incircolorivistafilosofica.it/nietzsche-umanista/
proprio essere in termini di libera necessità, ciascuno possa giungere a realizzare la propria essenza, ma pure come, oggi più che mai, è soltanto dalla coscienza di tutto ciò e dalla conseguente difesa della radice ultima di ogni individualità che ci si può attendere una vera difesa della libertà e della democrazia.
di Baruch Spinoza? Come cambierebbero le nostre vite
accettando di leggere gesti ed eventi quotidiani con occhiali
diversi? Il fortunoso rinvenimento di un manoscritto
anonimo è l’occasione per tentare una risposta a
simili interrogativi. Cercando di interpretare questo testo
misterioso, viene mobilitato il pensiero mitico-filosofico
di Parmenide e la filosofia del linguaggio di Vico, nonché
la morale di Spinoza e Petrarca. Ne risulta un sentiero
aperto su panorami insoliti e talvolta impervi, deciso a
condurre il lettore-esploratore verso alcune delle dottrine
più decisive della tradizione filosofica occidentale ma che
pure ancora attendono di essere ripensate con spirito
nuovo. Come quell’Alta Via dei Monti Liguri che s’inerpica
su crinali avvolti di boschi e mare, anche questo
testo disegna il tracciato di un cammino di ricerca che
vorrebbe tentare di far spazio, nel rumore della vita di
tutti i giorni, al silenzio da cui trae origine il pensiero.
https://www.ozsw.nl/study-group/study-group-comparative-global-philosophy/
This Summer School aims to bring together advanced students and established scholars working broadly on Spinoza’s thought, sources and reception. The goal of the Summer School is to create an international forum to stimulate scholarly exchange and conversations inspired by different approaches and methodologies.
During morning sessions, established scholars in several different areas of Spinoza studies will offer seminars on some of the frontier research topics in the field. Afternoon sessions will consist of discussions of selected papers presented by participants and reading groups on short texts belonging to Spinoza’s works, or significant for the reception of Spinoza’s philosophy.
Scholarships and fee waivers are available.
For full information see:
http://www.rug.nl/education/summer-winter-schools/summer_schools_2017/collegium-spinozanum/
Friendliness is best understood not in isolation, but rather in the broader context of the Buddha’s teaching. In that context, it plays an essential role as a catalyst for the unfolding of the whole Buddhist path. In this way, friendliness can also become a particularly interesting thread to follow in order to unpack and explore the meaning and practical implications of the core teachings conveyed in the discourses. This introduction can be used as both an entry point to explore how friendliness plays in the landscape of the discourses, and how that same landscape appears and unfold from the perspective disclosed by friendliness.
The campaign is inspired by Spinoza's account of reason and how social habits may contribute to foster rational decision within communities.