Professor of Religious Studies Heidi Ravven has been awarded a four-year Ford Foundation Grant for a long-term project on the philosopher Spinoza. The project will result in a book titled Rethinking Ethics and American Pluralism.
The first part of the book will critique the current state of philosophical ethics as being driven by unexamined and unacknowledged Christian theological presuppositions and show Spinoza's alternative ethics as emerging from his very different theological commitments. Ravven will also include evidence that the current state of neuroscience of the emotions provides empirical evidence that the mind (and body) work in just the ways that Spinoza predicted.
In the second part of the project Ravven will try to rethink the current discourse of American pluralism in light of Spinoza's model of religion and society in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus by exploring how that model might be revised and brought up to date through the study of three recent immigrant and minority communities (Indian Hindus, Moslems, and Native American Navajos and Mayans).
Ravven will explore how Spinoza can help us rethink ethics and American political pluralism. She will attempt to answer the question: How can Spinoza's model of ethics and of the multi-religious polity help us envision the next configuration of American identity, one transformed and informed by many immigrant and transnational identifications?
