The World as Representation: Schopenhauer's Arguments for Transcendental Idealism

In this paper, I discuss Spinoza's conception of the cosmological argument for the existence of God (hereafter CA), as it can be reconstructed taking departure from Letter 12. By a CA, I understand, quite broadly, an argument which infers a posteriori the existence of a necessary being, usually identified as God, from the experience that there exists some other being, often oneself, the existence of which is contingent upon the existence of this necessary being. The difference between various versions of the CA stems from differences in the way in which the relation of existential dependence is understood. The aim of this paper is to reconstruct a version of the CA which would be valid on Spinoza's principles. I argue that such a version must be understood in the context of Spinoza's causal rationalism. By such causal rationalism, I mean a doctrine committed to the idea that everything is rational and thus explicable and that causal explanations are somehow fundamental. Moreover, I hold that, in Spinoza's causal rationalism, there is one form of causation through which all other types of causation are ultimately understood. This ‘archetype’ of causation is self-causation.     

A Medieval Feminist Critique of the Chinese World Order: The Case of Wu Zhao (r. 690–705)

Medieval Chinese held that the circumscribed social space women might inhabit in life was encoded in the nature of their bodies. Gender conceptions common to China’s three religions—Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism—confirmed that women were allied to the passive and inner. Accounts of the only woman in Chinese history to occupy the throne in her own name, Wu Zhao, follow Chinese historians in portraying her as contravening this cosmology. Drawing on recent studies of the religious history of the body, I argue instead that Wu Zhao constructed a legitimizing strategy that took seriously, in ways not contemplated before, these fundamental tenets of Chinese religion.