Genevieve Lloyd, Reading Spinoza in the Anthropocene – Edinburgh University Press, May 2024

Brings Spinoza’s philosophy into engagement with contemporary debates on climate change

• Re-reads Spinoza’s Ethics from a perspective of concern with current climate change issues
• Brings the history of philosophy into direct engagement with conceptual aspects of current climate change issues
• Challenges common assumptions about Spinoza’s ‘rationalism’, through a fresh look at his treatment of the inter-relations of Reason, Imagination, and Emotion
• Acknowledges alternative textual interpretations, while making those scholarly disagreements themselves a source of engagement with contemporary issues

Central to Genevieve Lloyd’s approach is a fresh look at Spinoza’s critique of what he regards as Descartes’ flawed way of imagining the nature and status of human thought in relation to the rest of Nature. Lloyd argues that the influence of the Cartesian model lingers in the contemporary collective imagination. She challenges a common way of reading the Ethics, which reflects and reinforces the figure of Spinoza as a ‘rationalist’ — committed to the superiority and dominance of Reason within human minds. By offering a more nuanced account of Spinoza’s version of Reason, Lloyd brings his philosophy to bear on a range of familiar, but largely unexamined attitudes, which connect the supposed supremacy of Reason within the human mind to humanity’s supposed supremacy within Nature.