Professor of Religious Studies Heidi Ravven has published an article in the interdisciplinary journal Consciousness & Emotion. Ravven's piece, "Spinoza's Anticipation of Contemporary Affective Neuroscience," appears in Volume 4 Number 2, 2003. Consciousness & Emotion publishes work on psychological phenomena and consciousness and the brain from philosophy, psychology, and the neurosciences.
The journal emphasizes thoughtful analysis of the implications for contemporary problems and issues of recent empirical findings of both clinical and experiential research. Ravven's paper proposes that the 17th century philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, had an incipient neurobiological understanding of emotion that has turned out to be more or less correct. Spinoza went on to rethink ethics on the basis of that prescient biological account in ways that might be of considerable contemporary interest.
