Spinoza's hard path to freedom

Moira Gatens is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney,
where she was awarded an Australian Research Professorship in 2006.
Gatens has published widely in social and political philosophy and in
feminist studies, and is also internationally renowned as a Spinoza
scholar. Her books include Feminism and Philosophy (1991), Imaginary
Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality (1996) and (with Genevieve Lloyd)
Collective Imaginings, Spinoza Past and Present (1999). Most recently
she edited the collection Feminist Interpretations of Benedict Spinoza
(2009). Gatens received many awards, among others a Fellowship at
the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin in 2007-08 and a Visiting Professorship
at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2003.
Her current project is situated in the field of philosophy and literature,
with a special focus on the relations between the thought of Spinoza,
Feuerbach and George Eliot. In her two Spinoza Lectures "Spinoza's
Hard Path to Freedom", Gatens presents insights from her current
research: she is interested in the intricate ways in which philosophy
and literature, both in their specific ways, are concerned with
understanding how ways of knowing the world are linked to, and
affected by, particular ways of being in the world. In her first lecture,
Gatens offers a new reading of Spinoza's Ethics as well as the Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus by showing how a reflection on the ethical life
prompted his critique of theology and politics, highlighting the
collective and situated character of knowledge and interpreting the
role reason and imagination play in realizing freedom. In her second
lecture, Gatens interprets the 19th century novelist and translator
of Spinoza's Ethics George Eliot, and - more generally - the form of
"deliberative fiction" her novels represent, as yet another way to "to
enhance the collective power of human beings to become free". In
discussing Spinoza and Eliot, Gatens not only opens up new historical
perspectives, but also a systematic understanding of the intimate
connection between knowledge, imagination, and fiction, thereby
presenting us, in the form of both Spinoza's philosophy and Eliot's
literature, two different paths to freedom.