Moira Gatens appointed to Spinoza Chair in Amsterdam
27 May 2009
The University of Sydney's Professor Moira Gatens has been appointed to the prestigious Spinoza Chair at the University of Amsterdam for 2010.
"I'm absolutely delighted," said Gatens, currently an Australian Professorial Fellow in the University's philosophy department.
Professor Gatens is well known as a feminist theorist and social and political philosopher, but she is also a renowned expert in Benedict de Spinoza, the seventeenth century philosopher whose writings were considered to have laid the groundwork for the Enlightenment.
The Dutch-born philosopher from a family of Portuguese Jews opposed the mind-body dualism of Descartes' philosophy, rejecting the "binary oppositions of mind and body, reason and emotion, nature and transcendent being" according to Professor Gatens.
As a young student Professor Gatens says she was drawn to reading Spinoza who, unlike many other philosophers, "didn't exclude emotion or exclude imagination."
"I think many women are turned away from philosophy," says Professor Gatens, who was the only woman in her honours class, one of the few female post-graduates in her cohort and, at times, the only woman on staff in the various philosophy departments in which she has worked.
Professor Gatens's research has recently focused on the novels of George Eliot, who translated Spinoza's works to English. Eliot's novels, by synthesising imagination, feeling and intellect, were in many ways the applied embodiment of Spinoza's philosophy, argues Professor Gatens.
The Spinoza Chair is a two-month appointment, during which time Professor Gatens will deliver two public lectures and a series of staff and student seminars.
Gatens has also been invited to present the annual Spinoza lecture at Spinoza House in Rijnsburg, where the benches Spinoza worked at in his trade grinding optical lenses are still in place.
"This is a wonderful recognition of Professor Gatens's status as a major figure in contemporary philosophy," said Professor Duncan Ivison, Head of the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry.
"Previous holders of the Spinoza Chair include some of the leading philosophers in the world. Australia is known to punch above its weight in global philosophical circles, and this is yet another indication of just how good our philosophers are."
Contact: Kath Kenny
Phone: 02 9351 2261 or 0421 617 861