2023/12/18 by Justin Steinberg · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought #Medieval and Classical Philosophy #Historical Philosophy and Science
paper · doi:10.3998/phimp.4745
openalex publication_date 2023/12/18 · openalex created_date 2023/12/19 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
While psychological egoism is held in philosophical disrepute these days, most Anglophone scholars confidently ascribe this position to Spinoza. Perhaps the most prominent alternative ascribes to Spinoza a hedonistic theory of motivation, which, while more plausible as an interpretation, faces many of the same philosophical problems. In this paper I argue that, fortunately, there is a better interpretation of Spinoza’s theory of motivation that avoids saddling him with a philosophically implausible position. Spinoza is neither a psychological egoist nor a psychological hedonist, but is rather a thoroughgoing motivational pluralist, or one who thinks that we can intrinsically desire a disparate range of objects that do not fall under any single guise. But while he is a motivational pluralist, he is also in some (non-psychological) sense an egoist and a hedonist. By examining how Spinoza’s motivational pluralism coheres with his egoism and hedonism, we can appreciate the explanatory power of his theory of motivation, showing how he preserves the possibility of universal intelligibility without claiming (implausibly) that we always act under a single invariant guise.