Freedom of Necessity

What would it mean for philosophy to liberate its reader rather than merely persuade them?In The Freedom of Necessity, Rafael Winkler argues that Spinoza’s metaphysics and his therapeutics are inseparable: the liberation promised in the closing parts of the Ethics becomes intelligible only if the strict necessitarianism of Part 1 is true. Far from abolishing freedom, necessity is its condition. To understand why things could not have been otherwise is to be freed from the hope and fear, regret and anxiety bred by the illusion of contingency.Reading the Ethics alongside the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, Winkler reconstructs Spinoza’s system from its geometric method to its ethics of liberation. He defends the principle of sufficient reason and substance monism, re-examines the proofs of God’s existence and power, and shows that the identity of mind and body—one finite mode expressed under two attributes—is the hinge on which Spinoza’s practical philosophy turns. Engaging analytic literature and continental commentaries alike, and confronting contemporary thought’s suspicion of necessity, the book recovers the Ethics as a living practice of freedom.