Abstract Book - International Academy of Law and Mental Health

Spinoza’s Ethics and Mental HealthDavid Novak, University of Toronto (david.novak@utoronto.ca)The most famous, and by all accounts, the best philosopher to have ever lived in Amsterdam wasBaruch Spinoza (1632-1677). Though we usually consider Spinoza to be a metaphysician, healso had a well thought out ethic, one that spelled out what a harmonious human life could be. Aharmonious human life is one we would consider to be mentally healthy. Spinoza was certainlyinfluenced greatly by the famous adage of the Roman poet Juvenal (who was following an earlieradage of Thales, the earliest known Greek philosopher): “a healthy mind [mens sana] in ahealthy body [in corpore sano].” This is an excellent precedent for Spinoza, since he saw themind and the body to be two aspects of the same unified person, so that one cannot reduce thebody to the mind or reduce the mind to the body. Body and mind must be correlated at everylevel. Though mental/physical (what we would call “psychosomatic”) health is the main concernof his ethic, a person still has more control over their mind than they do over their body,nonetheless. That is why Spinoza’s ethic is meant to be therapeutic philosophy, i.e., it is meant toteach truly thoughtful persons how they can live a fully rational harmonious life. That life is onedirected by a supreme love, and it is a life of a person who learns to overcome love’s opposite,which is not hate but fear. Concerning that mentally healthy person, Spinoza writes: “A free manthinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation on life, not on death” (EthicsIV/prop. 67). This presentation will critically explore what kind of love enables a truly free,healthy person to overcome the fear of death, which for Spinoza is most destructive of aharmonious human life.The “I” that Is “We:” Rethinking Moral Agency Without Free Willand in Terms of Discoveries in the New Brain SciencesHeidi Ravven, Hamilton College (hravven@hamilton.edu)This presentation outlines a range of neurobiological and other evidence from the new brainsciences that we must relinquish the notion of free will as the source of moral agency and moralresponsibility. It refers to Damasio’s neural self-mapping and mechanisms of homeodynamicstability, mirror neurons, Panksepp’s seven basic emotional systems as contributory sources ofour human moral capacity. It argues that locate a basic biological striving in a self distributedbeyond our skin into our environments, natural and human. This is why we care about the worldand why it is the arena of our moral concern and of our ideals. As a consequence we must rethinkmoral responsibility in terms of the actual scope of its agents – from the individual to the groupand even beyond that to agents that span historical time periods.30