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What counts as an Individual for Spinoza?

In Olli Koistinen & John Ivan Biro (eds.), Spinoza: Metaphysical Themes. New York: Oup Usa. pp. 89-112 (2002)

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  1. Essence as power, or Spinoza on heartbreak.Karolina Hübner - forthcoming - Journal of the History of Philosophy.
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  • On the Derivation and Meaning of Spinoza's Conatus Doctrine.Valtteri Viljanen - 2008 - Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy 4:89-112.
    In this paper I begin by discussing the different ways in which Spinoza’s famous conatus argument has been understood, after which I present my own reconstruction of the derivation: each and every true finite thing is, in itself, an expresser of power (E1p25c, 1p34) that never acts self-destructively (E3p4) but instead strives to drive itself through opponents to produce effects as they follow from the definition of the thing in question (E1p25c, 1p34, and 3p5). This tells us something decisive about (...)
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  • (1 other version)“Eve’s Perfection: Spinoza on Sexual (In)Equality.”.Hasana Sharp - 2011 - Journal of the History of Philosophy 50.4 (2012) 50 (4):559-580.
    This paper outlines Spinoza’s two diametrically opposed views on the question of sexual equality. In the Political Treatise, he contends that women are naturally inferior to men, and that they are unable to practice virtue. Yet, he presents an antithetical portrait of Eve in his retelling of the Fall in the Ethics. There, Eve’s nature accords perfectly with Adam’s, and their relationship might have promoted virtue in each of them. Attention to Spinoza’s version of the Fall reveals the profound importance (...)
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  • (1 other version)Eve’s Perfection: Spinoza on Sexual (In)Equality.Hasana Sharp - 2012 - Journal of the History of Philosophy 50 (4):559-580.
    Through an examination of his remarks on Genesis, chapters 2–3, I will demonstrate that Spinoza’s argument for sexual inequality is not only an aberration,but a symmetrical inversion of a view he propounds, albeit implicitly, in his Ethics. In particular, “the black page” of his Political Treatise ignores, along with the intellectual capacities of women, the immeasurable benefits of affectionate partnership between a man and a woman that he extols in his retelling of the Genesis narrative. If the doctrine of the (...)
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  • Spinoza on the Fear of Solitude.Hasana Sharp - 2022 - Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy:137-162.
    Spinoza is widely understood to criticize the role that fear plays in political life. Yet, in the Political Treatise, he maintains that everyone desires civil order due to a basic and universal fear of solitude. This chapter argues that Spinoza represents the fear of solitude as both a civilizing passion and as an affect that needs to be amplified and encouraged. The turbulence of social and political life makes solitude attractive, but isolation undermines the conditions of human power. Although it (...)
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  • The Necessity of Finite Modes in Spinoza.Sungil Han - 2023 - Cheolhak-Korean Journal of Philosophy 156:49-89.
    It is standard to think that in Spinoza’s system, all things are necessary and in no sense contingent. However, in his classic book, Spinoza’s Metaphysics, published in 1969, Edwin Curley argues based on the proposition 28 of the first part of the Ethics that Spinoza endorses necessitarianism of only a modest kind, according to which when it comes to finite modes, there is a sense in which they are contingent. In this paper, I revisit Curley’s argument. Commentators have responded to (...)
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  • Spinoza’s Actualist Model of Power.Valtteri Viljanen - 2009 - In Juhani Pietarinen & Valtteri Viljanen (eds.), The World as Active Power: Studies in the History of European Reason. Leiden: Brill. pp. 213–228.
    In addition to the notion of power (potentia), Spinoza employs the notion of power of acting (agendi potentia), especially in the Ethics. This raises the question, if Spinoza uses both ‘power’ and ‘power of acting’, what is the difference between the two? What else could power be, for Spinoza, but power of acting? What is the relationship between power and activity in his system? This essays aims at giving answers to these questions; thereby emerges what may be called an actualist (...)
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  • Citizens and States in Spinoza’s Political Treatise.Michael LeBuffe - 2021 - Mind 130 (519):809-832.
    In his Political Treatise, Spinoza repeatedly compares states to human beings. In this interpretation of the comparisons, I present a progressively more restrictive account of Spinoza’s views about the nature of human beings in the Ethics and show at each step how those views inform the account of states in the Political Treatise. Because, like human beings, states are individuals, they strive to persevere in existence. Because, like human beings, states are composed of parts that are individuals, states' parts also (...)
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  • Spinoza on Composition, Monism, and Beings of Reason.Róbert Mátyási - 2020 - Journal of Modern Philosophy 2 (1):1-16.
    In this paper, I argue that Spinoza holds a perspectivalist view of mereological composition, a form of anti-realism. The paper has two parts: In the first half of the paper, I introduce interpretive puzzles for the standard realist reading of Spinoza’s mereology. In the second half of the paper, I discuss Spinoza’s positive view on mereological composition and present a perspectivalist reading that avoids the interpretive puzzles.
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  • Spinoza’s Commonwealth and the Anthropomorphic Illusion.Hasana Sharp - 2017 - Philosophy Today 16 (4):833-846.
    Balibar presents Spinoza as a profound critic of " the anthropomorphic illusion. " Spinoza famously derides the tendency of humans to project their own imagined traits and tendencies onto the rest of nature. The anthropomorphic illusion yields a gross overestimation our own agency. I argue in this essay that the flip side of this illusion is our refusal to extend certain properties we reserve exclusively to ourselves. The result is that we disregard the power of social and political institutions because (...)
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  • (1 other version)Spinoza in Twenty-First-Century American and French Philosophy: Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind, Moral and Political Philosophy.Jack Stetter & Charles Ramond (eds.) - 2019 - London: Bloomsbury Academic.
    Contributors: Steven Barbone, Laurent Bove, Edwin Curley, Valérie Debuiche, Michael Della Rocca, Simon B. Duffy, Daniel Garber, Pascale Gillot, Céline Hervet, Jonathan Israel, Chantal Jaquet, Mogens Lærke, Jacqueline Lagrée, Martin Lin, Yitzhak Y. Melamed, Pierre-François Moreau, Steven Nadler, Knox Peden, Alison Peterman, Charles Ramond, Michael A. Rosenthal, Pascal Sévérac, Hasana Sharp, Jack Stetter, Ariel Suhamy, Lorenzo Vinciguerra.
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  • Field Metaphysic, Power, and Individuation in Spinoza.Valtteri Viljanen - 2007 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 37 (3):393-418.
    Spinoza developed a highly interesting metaphysical theory of nature and individuality. In this paper, I endeavor to bring forward some ideas on how Spinozistic views on extended substance, physical world, and individuality can be approached using the concept of power as the basis of interpretation. Jonathan Bennett's ‘field metaphysical’ interpretation of Spinoza's doctrine of one extended substance has generated much discussion, and forms the other starting point of my paper. I believe that the field metaphysical interpretation enables one to deal (...)
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  • Spinoza on the Essences of Modes.Thomas M. Ward - 2011 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 19 (1):19-46.
    This paper examines some aspects of Spinoza's metaphysics of the essences of modes.2 I situate Spinoza's use of the notion of essence as a response to traditional, Aristotelian, ways of thinking about essence. I argue that, although Spinoza rejects part of the Aristotelian conception of essence, according to which it is in virtue of its essence that a thing is a member of a kind, he nevertheless retains a different part of such a conception, according to which an essence is (...)
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  • Spinoza on the Conditions that Nominally Define the Human Condition.Daniel Schneider - 2019 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 27 (5):753-773.
    ABSTRACTIn ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,’ Harry Frankfurt argues that a successful analysis of the concept ‘human’ must reveal something that distinguishes humans from non-human...
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  • Hegel, Spinoza, and the ‘Principle of Individuality’.Shachar Freddy Kislev - 2018 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 26 (4):499-522.
    ABSTRACTThis paper attempts to shed light on Hegel’s recurring comment that Spinoza’s philosophy lacks the ‘principle of individuality’. It shows that this criticism can have three distinct meanings: that Spinozism cannot account for the multiplicity of finite individuals; that Spinozism leads to a moral devaluation of the finite individual; the form of substance is indifferent and lacks a differentiating principle. It is shown that Hegel argued, somewhat incoherently, for all three.
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  • Spinoza on Individuals and Individuation: Metaphysics, Morals, and Politics.Matthew David Wion - unknown
    This dissertation examines Spinoza's position regarding the relationship of the individual to the community and to other individuals in the context of a particular reading of Spinoza's metaphysics as holistic. By the term "holistic metaphysics," I refer to a view of reality as a unified whole rather than as a collection of entirely separate parts. The latter I call a "reductionistic metaphysics." If a reductionistic metaphysics tends to see individuals as essentially separate and only secondarily relational, a holistic metaphysics pictures (...)
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  • Spinoza on essence and ideal individuation.Adam Murray - 2013 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 43 (1):78-96.
    My project in this paper is to fill a gap in Spinoza's theory of metaphysical individuation. In a few brief passages of the Ethics, Spinoza manages to explain his views on the nature of composition and the part-whole relation, the metaphysical facts which ground the individuation of simple bodies and the extended individuals they compose, and the persistence of one and the same individual through time and mereological change. Yet Spinoza nowhere presents a corresponding account of the individuation of simple (...)
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  • Spinoza and the "A Priori".Jon Miller - 2004 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 34 (4):555 - 590.
    Scorned by analytic philosophers for much of the twentieth century, the a priori has been newly befriended in recent years. This development is healthy but there is reason to be concerned about how it is unfolding. In particular, it is largely characterized by a certain historical myopia: contemporary philosophers are able to see back to Kant but not much beyond him. While it may be true that the a priori changed with Kant, this in itself provides us with a reason (...)
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  • Spinoza on Composition, Causation, and the Mind's Eternity.John Grey - 2014 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 22 (3):446-467.
    Spinoza's doctrine of the eternity of the mind is often understood as the claim that the mind has a part that is eternal. I appeal to two principles that Spinoza takes to govern parthood and causation to raise a new problem for this reading. Spinoza takes the composition of one thing from many to require causal interaction among the many. Yet he also holds that eternal things cannot causally interact, without mediation, with things in duration. So the human mind, since (...)
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  • Relational Autonomy in Spinoza. Freedom and Joint Action.Claudia Aguilar - 2023 - Comparative and Continental Philosophy 15 (1):36-44.
    Over the last years, some of Spinoza studies have shifted to a consideration of the relational character of his ethics by focusing on the notion of autonomy. This concept is foreign to Spinoza's vocabulary. Therefore, I will attempt to explain what Spinozan relational autonomy is and its connection with the most important ethical concept in his philosophy: freedom. Following considerations about Spinozan freedom, I claim that it entails a relational character and that, for this reason, it is equal to relational (...)
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  • Individuation and Death in Spinoza’s Ethics: The Spanish Poet Case Reconsidered.Davide Monaco - 2019 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 27 (5):941-958.
    The example of the Spanish poet’s amnesia, mentioned by Spinoza in the scholium of proposition 39 of part IV of the Ethics in order to elucidate his conception of death, has given rise to many controversies in the scholarly interpretations, which in most cases maintain that the poet dies and that Spinoza himself thought this way. However, the matter is more complex than it at first appears and in this article I take a different path by reconstructing this scholium anew (...)
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  • Metaphysics: the creation of hierarchy.Adrian Pabst - 2012 - Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co..
    "This book does nothing less than to set new standards in combining philosophical with political theology.
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