Spinoza's Philosophy of Ratio

Discover Spinoza's philosophy of ratio, from geometry and reason to bodies, affects and architecture

From his geometrical method to his geometrical examples; from his doctrine of reason to his explanation of bodies in motion; and from his account of the affects to his understanding of social relations, ratio is of prime importance in Spinoza's philosophy.

These essays explore the surprisingly varied dimensions of this unacknowledged keystone of Spinoza's thought. They take you from Spinoza's geometrical diagrams to his concepts of mind, body, the emotions, and the cosmos. It shows how Spinoza's thinking about ratio influences the concept of proportion in Gulliver's Travels, the differential ontology of Deleuze, egalitarian design for wellbeing, and the notion of an affective architecture.

Beth Lord is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. She is the author of Kant and Spinozism: Transcendental Idealism and Immanence from Jacobi to Deleuze (2011) and Spinoza's Ethics: an Edinburgh Philosophical Guide (2010), and editor of Spinoza Beyond Philosophy (2012) and the Bloomsbury Companion to Continental Philosophy (2009).