Lars Roland Vinx, Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy
BY MELİS ERDEM (ARCH/II)
The book that most influenced me? This question is difficult to answer, since books can have influence on one’s life in many different ways. Some books have given direction to my academic development, while others have been significant in helping me think about my own life. There is one book that has done both of these things for me: Spinoza’s “Ethics.” For that reason, it has a good claim to being the book that has influenced me the most.
A lot of different things happen in that book. The “Ethics,” though a relatively brief text, covers all areas of philosophy. It offers a metaphysics, a philosophy of mind, a psychology, a political philosophy and a promise of individual salvation for those who grasp all its arguments, which I haven’t, to be honest. The title of the text is a little bit misleading, given the modern understanding of the term “ethics.” Spinoza’s book is not so much about what we owe to others but rather about how we can achieve happiness for ourselves. The key claim is that happiness depends on understanding the world, and our place in it, as fully as possible.
Some parts of the book, especially the third and the fourth, which deal with emotions, have a therapeutic effect on me whenever I am dissatisfied with myself or others. Spinoza offers a very perceptive description of the psychological mechanisms that cause us to be angry or sad, or to be hostile to one another, whether we would like to be so affected or not. And to understand these mechanisms, in oneself and others, often helps to take the sting out of negative emotions.
This experience has also been significant for my academic work: I think that a lot of contemporary political philosophy and theory is too interested in 
offering moral evaluations of politics and not interested enough in understanding how it works. As a result, contemporary political philosophy often offers little more than rationalizations of Western prejudices. Spinoza’s philosophy is a good antidote to that danger. It encourages us to try to understand before we judge.
I first developed an interest in Spinoza’s work as a first-year graduate student at the University of Toronto. To immerse myself in Spinoza was a very good way for me to deal with the stress of being in a foreign country and far from home for the first time. Since Spinoza’s work is notoriously difficult, I am still trying to comprehend it all, and I reread the “Ethics” once a year. I learn something new each time I do that.
Though I enjoy the “Ethics” very much, I hesitate slightly to recommend it to others as recreational reading. The style of the book is very unusual, as it consists of a series of arguments that progressively build upon one another and that are expressed in a difficult terminology. It is hard to keep track of the narrative, and the text may appear very dry and a little inscrutable at first. But the effort to read the “Ethics” will be richly rewarded once you overcome the initial difficulties of understanding.