Professor Michael Della Rocca is Sterling Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. A rationalist, monist, skeptic, and renegade analytic philosopher, Michael Della Rocca is the author of The Parmenidean Ascent, of two books on Spinoza's philosophy, and of many articles in metaphysics and the history of modern philosophy.
In this lecture, Professor Della Rocca aims to shed light on Spinoza’s metaphysics and philosophy of mind by closely examining a central feature of Spinoza’s political philosophy: the relation between philosophy itself and theology, two domains which may seem radically distinct but are, for Spinoza, ultimately somehow united. The difficult task lies in explaining what “ultimately” means here, in articulating the “how” in this “somehow,” and in spelling out the distinction-undermining nature of this union between theology and philosophy. Professor Della Rocca then employs this kind of union in order to develop a robust account of the union between will and intellect and between finite and infinite in Spinoza. The lecture will close with some implications of these kinds of unions in Spinoza for his view on the eternity of the mind.
