Ontology and the Political Absolute: A Critical Reading of Spinoza on Women

Abstract

The "black page" in Spinoza's Political Treatise has been much discussed and interpreted. These can be roughly divided into three groups: Approaches that see the "black page" as an extension of Spinoza's theory of the passions and imagination; approaches that maintain that Spinoza excluded women from politics not because of their innate weaknesses but because of their social conditions; approaches that maintain that he excluded women because he saw them as weaker beings, but this contradicts his certain accounts, especially in the Ethics. In this paper, I take the latter view. My contribution is to argue that this contradiction is not unique to the Ethics. I pursue my reading