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Professor Beth Lord

Professor Beth Lord

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Professor Beth Lord
Professor Beth Lord

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work +44 (0)1224 272367
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The University of Aberdeen 50-52 College Bounds, room CB505
Mailing address:
University of Aberdeen
School of Divinity, History and Philosophy
50-52 College Bounds
Aberdeen
AB24 3UB
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Biography

I obtained my PhD from the University of Warwick in 2004. From 2004 to 2012 I worked in the Philosophy Department at the University of Dundee. I joined the University of Aberdeen in January 2013.

I teach and research the history of philosophy (modern and early modern) and recent continental philosophy. At Aberdeen I have taught courses on Descartes, Hume, Kant, history of political philosophy, history of ethics, and aesthetics. My research interests are mainly in early modern and modern metaphysics and political philosophy, especially Spinoza, Kant, German Idealism, and Deleuze. I am currently working on a book on Spinoza and Equality.

I am the author of Kant and Spinozism: Transcendental Idealism and Immanence from Jacobi to Deleuze and Spinoza's Ethics: an Edinburgh Philosophical Guide.

I am the editor of Spinoza's Philosophy of Ratio and Spinoza Beyond Philosophy, and co-editor of the Bloomsbury Companion to Continental Philosophy.

 

Latest Publications

  • Outside of human nature: Spinoza on affective difference

    Lord, B.

  • Spinoza's Political Psychology: The Taming of Fortune and Fear: Book Review

    Lord, B.

  • We are nature: Spinoza helps diagnose the bad ideas and sad passions that preclude us from a finer relationship with the natural world

    Lord, B.

  • Spinoza and 'no platforming': Enlightenment thinker would have seen it as motivated by ambition rather than fear

    Lord, B., Douglas, A.

  • Spinoza and architectural thinking

    Lord, B.

View all Publications

Memberships and Affiliations

Internal
External

I am on the executive board of the Society for European Philosophy and the management committee of the British Society for the History of Philosophy.

Research

Research Overview

I work primarily on the history of philosophy, particularly Spinoza and Kant, and its relationship to recent continental philosophy.

I am currently working on a book on Spinoza and Equality. In the book I deny that Spinoza is an egalitarian in the standard sense of holding persons to be moral equals. I argue that Spinoza relies on a largely unacknowledged yet distinctive and historically grounded concept of equality: equality as a state of being. The book explores the significance of this concept for Spinoza's metaphysics and political philosophy, and suggests that it is only through this concept that we can understand the specific sense in which Spinoza is an egalitarian.

The book is partly based on research undertaken in the AHRC project Equalities of Wellbeing in Philosophy and Architecture for which I was Principal Investigator (2013-16). The project focused on the connection between Spinoza's concept of equality and architectural theory, drawing on a shared notion of proportion. Our aim was to investigate this distinctive way of thinking about equality, and to consider how it can affect the wellbeing of individuals and communities through the built environment. An edited book based on the project, Spinoza's Philosophy of Ratio, was published by Edinburgh University Press (2018).

I am director of the Spinoza Research Network, an interdisciplinary group of over 200 Spinoza researchers worldwide. I also do occasional interdisciplinary research on philosophy and museums.

Supervision

I currently supervise PhD students working on Spinoza, Kant, political philosophy, Enlightenment thought, contemporary continental philosophy, and Deleuze. I am happy to hear from prospective PhD and MLitt students who are interested in working on topics in my areas of expertise, including interdisciplinary projects.

Research Funding and Grants

2013-16: AHRC Standard Research Grant for Equalities of Wellbeing in Philosophy and Architecture

2012-13: Research Fellowship with the Centre for Arts and Humanities Research at the Natural History Museum, London

2008-10: AHRC Networks Grant for the Spinoza Research Network

Teaching

Courses

Publications

Publications 

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  • Spinoza's Political Psychology: The Taming of Fortune and Fear: Book Review

    Lord, B.

    The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 71, no. 1, pp. 211-214

    Contributions to Journals: Reviews of Books, Films and Articles

    Digital Object Identifier
    https://doi.org/10.1093/pq/pqaa038

  • Our feelings are not our own

    Lord, B.

    The Philosopher, vol. 107, pp. 24-27

    Contributions to Specialist Publications: Articles

    Additional Links
    Journal website

  • Spinoza's Philosophy of Ratio

    Lord, B. (ed.)

    Edinburgh University Press

    Books and Reports: Books

  • Ratio as the basis of Spinoza's concept of equality

    Lord, B.

    Spinoza's Philosophy of Ratio. Lord, B. (ed.). Edinburgh University Press

    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters

  • Spinoza on thinking substance and the non-substantial mind

    Lord, B.

    Philosophy of Mind in the Early Modern and Modern Ages. Copenhaver, R. (ed.). Routledge, 21 pages

    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters

  • Spinoza and Ranciere on disagreement and equality: (in Japanese)

    Lord, B.

    Menschenontologie, vol. 23, pp. 39-52

    Contributions to Journals: Articles

  • The free man and the free market: Ethics, politics, and economics in Spinoza’s Ethics IV

    Lord, B.

    Spinoza's Ethics. Melamed, Y. (ed.). Cambridge University Press

    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters

    Digital Object Identifier
    https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316339213

  • Spinoza on natural inequality and the fiction of moral equality

    Lord, B.

    Reassessing the Radical Enlightenment. Ducheyne, S. (ed.). Routledge, pp. 127-142, 16 pages

    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters

    Digital Object Identifier
    https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315613642

  • ‘A Sudden Surprise of the Soul’: Wonder in Museums and Early Modern Philosophy

    Lord, B.

    Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements, vol. 79, pp. 95-116

    Contributions to Journals: Articles

    Digital Object Identifier
    https://doi.org/10.1017/S1358246116000096

  • Deleuze and Kant's Critique of Judgment

    Lord, B.

    At the Edges of Thought. Lundy, C., Voss, D. (eds.). Edinburgh University Press, pp. 85-102, 17 pages

    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters

  • Koncepcja rownosci w Traktacie teologiczno-politycznym Spinozy (The concept of equality in Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise)

    Lord, B.

    Filozofia Oswiecenia. Miklaszewska, J., Tomaszewska, A. (eds.). Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellonskiego, pp. 142-167, 26 pages

    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters

  • Spinoza for our time: Politics and Postmodernity

    Lord, B.

    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, no. 2014.03.08

    Contributions to Journals: Reviews of Books, Films and Articles

  • Spinoza on Philosophy, Religion, and Politics

    Lord, B.

    The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 64, no. 254, pp. 191-193

    Contributions to Journals: Reviews of Books, Films and Articles

    Digital Object Identifier
    https://doi.org/10.1093/pq/pqt013

  • Spinoza and German Idealism

    Lord, B.

    British Journal for the History of Philosophy, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 178-181

    Contributions to Journals: Reviews of Books, Films and Articles

    Digital Object Identifier
    https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2013.874974

  • Becoming cat

    Lord, B.

    Radical Philosophy, vol. 175

    Contributions to Journals: Reviews of Books, Films and Articles

  • Deleuze and Kant

    Lord, B.

    The Cambridge Companion to Deleuze. Smith, D., Somers-Hall, H. (eds.). Cambridge University Press, pp. 82-102, 20 pages

    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters

  • Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise: A Critical Guide

    Lord, B.

    British Journal for the History of Philosophy, vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 636-639

    Contributions to Journals: Reviews of Books, Films and Articles

    Digital Object Identifier
    https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2012.686983

  • Kant and Spinoza

    Lord, B.

    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Entries for Encyclopedias and Dictionaries

  • Spinoza Beyond Philosophy

    Lord, B. (ed.)

    Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. 214 pages

    Books and Reports: Books

  • Between Imagination and Reason: Kant and Spinoza on Fictions

    Lord, B.

    Inventions of the Imagination. Gray, R. T., Halmi, N., Handwerk, G. J., Rosenthal, M. A., Vieweg, K. A. (eds.). University of Washington Press, pp. 36-53, 18 pages

    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters

  • Kant and Spinozism: Transcendental Idealism and Immanence from Jacobi to Deleuze

    Lord, B.

    Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. 214 pages

    Books and Reports: Books

  • Spinoza's ethics: an Edinburgh Philosophical Guide

    Lord, B.

    Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. 182 pages

    Books and Reports: Books

  • Introduction

    Lord, B.

    The Bloomsbury Companion to Continental Philosophy. Lord, B., Mullarkey, J. (eds.). Bloomsbury, pp. 1-8, 8 pages

    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters

  • The Continuum Companion to Continental Philosophy

    Mullarkey, J. (ed.), Lord, B. (ed.)

    Bloomsbury, London. 432 pages

    Books and Reports: Books

  • Immanuel Kant

    Lord, B.

    Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought. Weber, M. (ed.). Ontos, pp. 313-323, 11 pages

    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters

  • The Virtual and the Ether: Transcendental Empiricism in Kant's Opus Postumum

    Lord, B.

    Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 147-166

    Contributions to Journals: Articles

  • From the Document to the Monument: Museums and the Philosophy of History

    Lord, B.

    Museum Revolutions. Knell, S. (ed.). 1 edition. Routledge, pp. 355-366, 12 pages

    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters

  • Thinking about Museums: Philosophical Perspectives

    Lord, B., Jarron, M.

    Museum Management and Curatorship, vol. 21, no. 2

    Contributions to Journals: Special Issues

  • History and Postmodernism: Review Essay

    Lord, B., Tomlinson, J.

    Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, vol. 26, no. 1-2, pp. 121-131

    Contributions to Journals: Reviews of Books, Films and Articles

    Digital Object Identifier
    https://doi.org/10.3366/jshs.2006.26.1-2.121

  • Foucault's Museum: Difference, Representation, and Genealogy

    Lord, B.

    Museum and Society, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 1-14

    Contributions to Journals: Articles

  • Representing Enlightenment Space

    Lord, B.

    Reshaping Museum Space. MacLeod, S. (ed.). Routledge, pp. 146-157, 12 pages

    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters

  • Kant's Productive Ontology

    Lord, B.

    Pli: the Warwick Journal of Philosophy, vol. 14, pp. 157-86

    Contributions to Journals: Articles

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