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For our fourth edition of our Spinoza Sessions Series, host Baruch Gottlieb will meet Dr. Torkild Thanem Professor of Management & Organization Studies at the University of Stockholm. Together they will explore some Spinoza concerns regarding the behaviours of governments, institutions and citizens in the face to the covid-19 pandemic and ensuing control measures. To what degree has the kind of rationality encouraged by Spinoza actually been in evidence in the ongoing events. How are decisions made on how and when to curtail freedoms, either on the part of individuals or of the authorities? What are the prospects for embodied ethics in times of social distancing? Referring from the Ethics and the Tractatus Politicus, Dr. Thanem will take a critical look at what this crisis seems to manifest to us about our prospects, for the future of life and work after the crisis, and about the future of the physical office and the digitalization and migration into the intimate space of the home. As usual we will be taking questions in the stream chat, please join us!

The Spinoza Sessions are curated and hosted by Baruch Gottlieb as part of West Den Haag's Thuistezien program, where we explore all the ways we can engage and exchange together through the available technologies and techniques, This is a series of conversations featuring contemporary thinkers for whom Spinoza's thinking offers some helpful insights into our contemporary condition.

Torkild Thanem is Professor of Management & Organization Studies at Stockholm University, Sweden. Torkild’s work focuses on the ethical, political and embodied aspects of organizational life, and over the past decade he has drawn on Spinozian thought to explore this in the realms of leadership, management and gender. His most recent book is Embodied Research Methods (co-authored with David Knights and published by Sage in 2019).