Table of Contents

Introduction: Why All Education Begins and Ends in Moral Education 1. Spinoza’s Ethical Project 2. To Be Educated Is to Exist More: Spinoza’s Gradualist Notion of Reality 3. Self-preservation as an Educational Ideal 4. Moderating the Passive Affects: Education, Imagination and Causation 5. Educational Implications of the Doctrine of the Imitation of Affects 6. Teaching as the Art of Offering the Right Amount of Resistance Conclusion: Outlining a Spinozistic Account of Education

About the Author

Johan Dahlbeck is Senior Lecturer in Child and Youth Studies at Malmö University.

Reviews

‘Spinoza argued that the greatest help to one person seeking knowledge is another person with the same aim. Johan Dahlbeck presents an engaging, original account of how we help one another. Spinoza and Education is a well-informed, useful introduction to Spinoza and a thoughtful application of Spinoza’s views to pressing issues in the philosophy of education.’Michael LeBuffe, Professor, University of Otago, New Zealand‘This book contributes to the ongoing reconception of Spinoza as foremost a moral philosophy, while developing an important conversation about Spinoza’s philosophy of education. The book adeptly renders a famously obscure and abstract philosophical system into a comprehensible and practical theory that speaks productively to the real life concerns facing educators and students.’Matthew J. Kisner, author of Spinoza on Human Freedom: Reason, Autonomy and the Good Life, University of South Carolina, USA‘Spinoza excites the educational imagination. Johan Dahlbeck’s Spinoza and Education amplifies this excitement, engaging with the ‘substance’ of Spinoza’s ethics of self-preservation, and taking care to trace the implications of this ethics for teachers. As such Dahlbeck’s work reveals the Spinozan roots of many contemporary critiques of institutionalised education.’Andrew Gibbons, Associate Professor, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand