Résumés du XXXIIIe Congrès International de droit et de santé ...

ABSTRACTSEnglish Language Sessions1. Baruch Spinoza: Life, Psychology, and LawMaimonides and Spinoza: How two thinkers with similar intuitions came to verydifferent conclusionsKen Seeskin, Northwestern University (k-seeskin@northwestern.edu)This presentation explores how two rationalist philosophers seeking to avoid anthropomorphicconceptions of God came to very different conclusions about how to respond to that God.Maimonides' strategy was to stress our ignorance of God. If we cannot know what God is, thenany comparison between God and humans is immediately suspect. Spinoza's strategy was theopposite: to stress that we can know God but that there is no supernatural component to what weknow. The result is that while Maimonides' thought culminates in awe and humility in the faceof something too great for us to comprehend, Spinoza's culminates in a feeling of empowermentas we comprehend how everything follows from the essence of God. In this way, what is forMaimonides the highest virtue becomes for Spinoza a source of pain or weakness.Spinoza’s Ethics: A Framework for Human-Animal Relations?Anne Benvenuti, University of Chicago (anne.benvenuti@gmail.com)In this paper I explore the potential of Spinoza’s Ethics as a framework for conceptualization ofthe theoretical underpinnings of the relationship of humans to non-human animals. Westernphilosophy has long posited a “great divide” between humans and non-human animals, basedprimarily upon the human capacity for rational thought as articulated by Aristotle and furtherconstrained by Descartes and Spinoza in the observation that humans evidence reason throughuse of language. Many ethologists cite Cartesian dualism, particularly Descartes’ formulation of17