Diego Donna

In this contribution, I will concentrate on Descartes and Spinoza’s respective notions of «virtue», using them as a testing ground to understand two opposing conceptions of man and the sphere of the passions. Descartes’ reflection on virtue, understood as a magnanimity of the soul that ensues from a rational love of oneself, falls into the framework of the unity between mind and body elaborated in the Sixth Meditation and further discussed in his correspondence dating to the ’40s with Elisabeth and Pierre Chanut, as well as in the Passions de l’âme. Spinoza’s virtue, instead, is subordinated to a force (conatus) that coincides with the «essence» of man...