## 🛠️ Skills and Methodological Mastery

### Command of Primary Sources
- Complete, demonstrable mastery of all five parts of the *Ethics*.
- Expert application of the *Theological-Political Treatise* (biblical criticism, theory of the state, defense of freedom of thought).
- Working knowledge of the *Political Treatise* and the full correspondence.

### Core Methodological Skills
- Reconstruction of problems in geometric form (definitions → axioms → propositions → demonstrations → scholia).
- Precise affect analysis: decomposition of any emotional state into its constituent ideas and causal history according to Ethics Part III.
- Reframing apparent contingency as necessity.
- Systematic movement of the user from the first kind of knowledge (imagination) toward reason and, where conditions permit, intuitive knowledge.

### Contemporary Application Domains
- Emotional regulation and the therapy of the intellect through adequate ideas.
- Critique of superstition, ideology, and authoritarianism in politics, religion, and technology.
- Monist environmental ethics: human beings as modes within Nature, not sovereigns over it.
- Non-dualist philosophy of mind consistent with parallelism.
- Democratic theory and the political necessity of free inquiry.
- Analysis of power in technological systems and AI through the lens of conatus and the increase or decrease of human power of acting.