Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

Keynote Speakers

photo of Susan James

Susan James

Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London.

Susan James’ recent research has focused on 17th century philosophy, particularly the work of Margaret Cavendish and Spinoza, and ranges over seventeenth-century metaphysics, epistemology, psychology, ethics, gender and politics. Her latest book, Spinoza on Learning to Live Together (2020) is about how these areas of knowledge contribute to the overall philosophical project of living well. Her previous book, Spinoza on Philosophy, Religion and Politics: The Theological-Political Treatise (2012) provides a comprehensive and wonderfully written guide to the topic of this conference. Historical research, as James practices it, is both a way of recovering past points of view, and a way of examining contemporary philosophical problems. Her discussions of early modern texts aim to do justice to the contexts in which they were written, while also contributing to current debates, particularly in political and social philosophy, the philosophy of gender and the philosophy of art.

photo of Beth Lord

Beth Lord

Professor of Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen.

Beth Lord works primarily on the history of philosophy, particularly Spinoza and Kant, and its relationship to recent continental philosophy. She is the author of Kant and Spinozism: Transcendental Idealism and Immanence from Jacobi to Deleuze and Spinoza's Ethics: an Edinburgh Philosophical Guide, as well as numerous invaluable edited collections and articles on Spinoza and continental philosophy. She is currently working on a book on Spinoza and Equality. In the book she denies that Spinoza is an egalitarian in the standard sense of holding persons to be moral equals. She argues that Spinoza relies on a largely unacknowledged yet distinctive and historically grounded concept of equality: equality as a state of being. The book explores the significance of this concept for Spinoza's metaphysics and political philosophy, and suggests that it is only through this concept that we can understand the specific sense in which Spinoza is an egalitarian.

photo of Hasana Sharp

Hasana Sharp

Associate Professor of Philosophy at McGill University.

Hasana Sharp’s research is in the history of political philosophy with a focus on Spinoza.  Her 2011 book Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization examines the implications of Spinoza's denial of human exceptionalism for ethics and politics, with consideration of arguments in feminist thought and critical race theory. She is currently undertaking a SSHRC-funded research project on Spinoza and Servitude. She interested in how his analyses of human servitude, bondage, and slavery, central to both his ethics and politics, can be understood in relationship to other models. In particular, how do Spinoza's philosophical and political conceptions of servitude interact with the notions of his contemporaries objecting to the enslavement of African and Indigenous peoples or to the domination of women?

photo of Martin Saar

Martin Saar

Professor of Social Philosophy at Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main.

He has taught in Bremen, Hamburg, Berlin and Leipzig. His areas of specialization and teaching are contemporary political and social philosophy and the history of early modern and modern political thought with special focus on Spinoza, Nietzsche, Marx, Foucault, Critical Theory, Post-structuralism, and interdisciplinary research on collective memory, affect, ideology, aesthetics, and power). He is author of Genealogie als Kritik. Geschichte und Theorie des Subjekts nach Nietzsche und Foucault (2007), Die Immanenz der Macht: Politische Theorie nach Spinoza (2013) and numerous papers on Spinoza’s political philosophy. Recent texts have dealt with the ‘‘ontological turn’’ in political philosophy and current Critical Theory.

photo of Mogens Lærke

Mogens Lærke

Senior researcher at the CNRS, currently based at the Maison Française d'Oxford, visiting from the research institute IHRIM at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon.

Lærke has published widely on early modern metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of religion and political philosophy, and on historiographical methodology. Monographs include Leibniz lecteur de Spinoza. La genèse d’une opposition complexe (Champion 2008) and Les Lumières de Leibniz. Controverses avec Huet, Bayle, Regis et More (Classiques Garnier 2015). A new book on Spinoza and the Freedom of Philosophizing is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2021. He is the editor or co-editor of numerous volumes on Spinoza and his contemporaries, including (with Daniel Garber, Pierre-François Moreau and Pino Totaro) Spinoza: Reason, Religion, and Politics (Oxford University Press, forthcoming); and with Moreau and Raphaële Andrault, Spinoza/Leibniz, Rencontres, Controverses, Réceptions (Presses Universitaires de Paris-Sorbonne 2014).