Looking for Spinoza by Antonio Damasio, William Heinemann Harcourt, £20/$28, ISBN 0434007870 0151005575
VICTORIAN writer Samuel Butler said that even a potato in a dark cellar has a kind of low cunning that stands it in excellent stead. Although he may not have known it, he was recapturing the 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza’s notion of conatus. Sometimes translated as “endeavour”, it is the universal striving in living things for homeostasis and self-preservation.
In Looking for Spinoza the eminent neurologist and writer Antonio Damasio salutes this idea from Spinoza and much else. The Dutch thinker prefigured a view of ourselves, particularly…
