I address an apparent conflict between Spinoza’s concepts of immanent causation and acting/doing [agere]. Spinoza apparently holds that an immanent cause undergoes [patitur] whatever it does. Yet according to his stated definition of acting and undergoing in the Ethics, this is impossible; to act is to be an adequate cause, while to undergo is to be merely a partial cause. Spinoza also seems committed to God’s being the adequate cause of all things, and, in a well-known passage, appears to deny (...) categorically that God is capable of undergoing. How then can God also be the immanent cause of all things, as Spinoza claims? On the basis of a close reading of the passage in question, I argue that Spinoza actually distinguishes between two senses of undergoing. An immanent cause undergoes not by being a partial cause but rather by being the metaphysical subject of its effect. While this sense of undergoing has its roots in scholasticism, Spinoza’s willingness to attribute such a capacity to undergo to God is idiosyncratic and reveals important ways in which his understanding of essence, perfection, and causation differs from the scholastic model. (shrink)

What surfaces first when one examines the philosophy of mind of Sartre and Spinoza are the differences between them. For Spinoza a human mind is a mode of the divine mind. That view is a far cry from Sartre’s view of human consciousness as a desire never achieved: the desire to be god, to be the foundation of one’s own existence. How could two philosophers, one a determinist and the other who grounds human freedom in the nature of consciousness itself, (...) be seen as having any commonalities worth exploring? How could the noted user of the deductive method and one of the most important phenomenologists of the twentieth century share any philosophical ground at all? I will argue in this paper that despite the very real differences between their two philosophies, there are striking similarities between Sartre’s view of consciousness and Spinoza’s view of the mind. They become apparent when one examines each one’s analysis of the nature of mind and its relationship to itself, the body, and the world. Both are heir to a kind of Aristotelian naturalism. This commonality between them derives from their mutual rejection of Descartes’ substance dualism. I first explore the consequences of that rejection on how each one conceives of the relationship between the mind and its objects. Next I examine their view of the mind’s relation to itself and finally I look at how each one understood the mind’s relationship to the body and the world. The examination of their two views reveals how much they anticipate and support theories of mind defended by contemporary analytic philosophers of mind. (shrink)

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 (...) some structural feature of a thing which causally explains other, non-essential features. I go on to develop an account of Spinoza's metaphysics of essence, according to which essences, what he sometimes calls formal essences, are produced by the divine essence prior to and independent of the creation of finite modes, and according to which essences are the formal or exemplar causes of finite modes. I then argue that finite modes, in virtue of the formal essences which they actualize, are genuine causal relata. Finally, I offer some speculations about Spinoza's answer to the question, "Why, in a necessitarian cosmos filled with formal essences, should there be temporal finite modes at all?". (shrink)

Spinoza is most often seen as a stern advocate of mechanistic efficient causation, but examining his philosophy in relation to the Aristotelian tradition reveals this view to be misleading: some key passages of the Ethics resemble so much what Surez writes about emanation that it is most natural to situate Spinoza's theory of causation not in the context of the mechanical sciences but in that of a late scholastic doctrine of the emanative causality of the formal cause; as taking a (...) look at the seventeenth-century philosophy of mathematics reveals, this is in consonance also with Spinoza's geometrical cast of mind. Against this background, I examine Spinoza's essentialist model of causation according to which each thing has a formal character determined by the thing's essence and what follows from that essence. In the case of real things this essential causal architecture results in efficacy, i.e. in bringing about real effects, the key idea being that without the essential, formally structured causal thrust there would be no efficacy in the first place. I also explain how this model accounts for efficient causation taking place between finite things. (shrink)

Of the two main interpretations of Spinoza's theory of the identity of the attributes, in particular those of Thought and Extension, the objective interpretation is now almost universally preferred to the subjective. Rejection of the subjective interpretation, according to which the attributes are merely our ways of cognizing a reality whose real essence remains unknown, is certainly justified, but the objective theory comes too near to replacing the identity by a mere correlation of diff rents to be quite satisfactory. Is (...) it not better to say that Thought and Extension represent two complementary conceptions of reality which are both correct? Yes, but in saying so some commentators ascribe to mind, as Spinoza conceives it, an unplausibly abstract status. An alternative proposal is made as to a way in which Spinoza might be right in essentials, though it requires that a certain tension in Spinozism as to the nature of body be resolved in a particular direction. (shrink)

While both intuitive knowledge and reason are adequate ways of knowing for Spinoza, they are not equal. Intuitive knowledge, which Spinoza describes as the ‘greatest virtue of mind’, is superior to reason. The nature of this superiority has been the subject of some controversy due to Spinoza's notoriously parsimonious treatment of the distinction between reason and intuitive knowledge in the Ethics. In this paper, I argue that intuitive knowledge differs from reason not only in terms of its method of cognition—but (...) also in terms of its content. More specifically, I maintain that there is something that is known by intuition, namely the unique essences of things, that is not known by reason. My argument is supported by an examination of Spinoza's account of essences in the Ethics, which reveals that he is committed to both unique and shared essences. Based on this dual commitment, I argue that whereas for Spinoza both reason and intuition can be said to reach adequate knowledge of the shared essence of a thing, the unique essence of a singular thing, which is nothing but its actual essence, can only be known through intuitive knowledge. (shrink)

Consider a circle and a pair of its semicircles. Which is prior, the whole or its parts? Are the semicircles dependent abstractions from their whole, or is the circle a derivative construction from its parts? Now in place of the circle consider the entire cosmos (the ultimate concrete whole), and in place of the pair of semicircles consider the myriad particles (the ultimate concrete parts). Which if either is ultimately prior, the one ultimate whole or its many ultimate parts?

Name der Zeitschrift: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie Jahrgang: 63 Heft: 3 Seiten: 476-496.

In this essay, I suggest that Spinoza acknowledges a distinction between formal reality that is infinite and timelessly eternal and formal reality that is non-infinite (i. e., finite or indefinite) and non-eternal (i. e., enduring). I also argue that if, in Spinoza’s system, only intelligible causation is genuine causation, then infinite, timelessly eternal formal reality cannot cause non-infinite, non-eternal formal reality. A denial of eternal-durational causation generates a puzzle, however: if no enduring thing – not even the sempiternal, indefinite individual (...) composed of all finite, enduring things – is caused by the infinite, eternal substance, then how can Spinoza consistently hold that the one infinite, eternal substance is the cause of all things and that all things are modes of that substance? At the end of this essay, I sketch how Spinoza could deny eternal-durational causation while still holding that an infinite, eternal God is the cause of all things and that all things are modes. I develop the interpretation more in the companion essay.1 1 In “Spinoza’s Monism II,” in the next issue of this journal. (shrink)

An old question in Spinoza scholarship is how finite, non-eternal things transitively caused by other finite, non-eternal things (i. e., the entities described in propositions like E1p28) are caused by the infinite, eternal substance, given that what follows either directly or indirectly from the divine nature is infinite and eternal (E1p21–23). In “Spinoza’s Monism I,” “Spinoza’s Monism I,” in the previous issue of this journal. I pointed out that most commentators answer this question by invoking entities that are indefinite and (...) sempiternal, but argued that perhaps we should not be so quick to assume that in Spinoza’s system, an infinite and eternal substance could cause such indefinite, sempiternal entities. But if such eternal-durational causation is denied, then it seems harder to see how Spinoza’s system could be coherent: if Spinoza holds that the infinite, eternal substance cannot cause anything that is not infinite and not eternal, then how can he also hold that all things are modes immanently caused by substance (E1p15, E1p18, E1p25)? In this essay, I explain how Spinoza’s system could be understood in light of a denial of eternal-durational causation. On the interpretation I offer, God is the cause of all things and all things are modes because the essences of all things follow from the divine nature and all essences enjoy infinite, eternal reality as modes immanently caused by the infinite, eternal substance. The same non-substantial essences can also be conceived as enjoying non-infinite, non-eternal reality, but so conceived, they are enduring, finite (or sempiternal, indefinite) entities that cannot be conceived as modes caused by and inhering in the one infinite, eternal substance. I conclude by pointing out that if we take this interpretive route, we do have to understand Spinoza as committed to acosmism, or a denial of the reality of the world – at least the world of enduring, finite things. (shrink)

My two principal aims in this essay are interconnected. One aim is to provide a new interpretation of the ‘infinite modes’ in Spinoza’s Ethics. I argue that for Spinoza, God, conceived as the one infinite and eternal substance, is not to be understood as causing two kinds of modes, some infinite and eternal and the rest finite and non-eternal. That there cannot be such a bifurcation of divine effects is what I take the ‘infinite mode’ propositions, E1p21–23, to establish; E1p21–23 (...) show that each and every one of the immanent effects of an infinite and eternal God is an infinite and eternal mode. The other aim is to show that these propositions can be understood as part of an extended critical response to Descartes’s infamous doctrine that God creates eternal truths and true and immutable natures. If we have the correct (Spinozan) conceptions of what God is and how God works, we see that an eternal and infinite God can only be understood to cause ‘eternal truths,’ and that these eternal truths are infinite and eternal modes of God. (shrink)

The conservation of energy and momentum have been viewed as undermining Cartesian mental causation since the 1690s. Modern discussions of the topic tend to use mid-nineteenth century physics, neglecting both locality and Noether’s theorem and its converse. The relevance of General Relativity has rarely been considered. But a few authors have proposed that the non-localizability of gravitational energy and consequent lack of physically meaningful local conservation laws answers the conservation objection to mental causation: conservation already fails in GR, so there (...) is nothing for minds to violate. This paper is motivated by two ideas. First, one might take seriously the fact that GR formally has an infinity of rigid symmetries of the action and hence, by Noether’s first theorem, an infinity of conserved energies-momenta. Second, Sean Carroll has asked how one should modify the Dirac–Maxwell–Einstein equations to describe mental causation. This paper uses the generalized Bianchi identities to show that General Relativity tends to exclude, not facilitate, such Cartesian mental causation. In the simplest case, Cartesian mental influence must be spatio-temporally constant, and hence 0. The difficulty may diminish for more complicated models. Its persuasiveness is also affected by larger world-view considerations. The new general relativistic objection provides some support for realism about gravitational energy-momentum in GR. Such realism also might help to answer an objection to theories of causation involving conserved quantities, because energies-momenta would be conserved even in GR. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss Spinoza on the proper methods and content of physical science. I start by showing how Spinoza's epistemology leads him to a kind of pessimism about the prospects of empirical and mathematical methods in natural philosophy. While they are useful for life, they do not tell us about nature, as Spinoza puts it, “as it is in itself.” At the same time, Spinoza seems to allow that we have some knowledge of physical things and their behavior. (...) So I go on to outline and critique a few of the accounts of how Spinoza thinks we can do this, focusing on the role of the common notions in physics. In the third section, I discuss the possible contents of physics, for Spinoza, and argue that they are not, as is usually thought, fundamentally Cartesian. I conclude by pointing to some promising directions for future research and suggesting a few heuristics for such research. (shrink)

Se abordan las tres cuestiones principales que aparecen en la correspondencia entre Tschirnhaus y Spinoza: la libertad; la producción de los cuerpos a partir del atributo extensión; la relación entre los modos del atributo pensamiento y los modos de los demás atributos. Se analizan las dificultades que Tschirnhaus detecta y el valor y alcance de las respuestas de Spinoza.

According to a common reading, Spinoza and Leibniz stand on opposite ends of the modal spectrum. At one extreme lies ‘‘Spinoza the necessitarian,’’ for whom the actual world is the only possible world. At the other lies ‘‘Leibniz the anti-necessitarian,’’ for whom the actual world is but one possible world among an infinite array of other possible worlds; the actual world is privileged for existence only in virtue of a free decree of a benevolent God. In this paper, I challenge (...) both of these readings. Spinoza is no necessitarian and Leibniz is no anti-necessitarian – at least as these characterizations are usually understood. Rather, I contend, Spinoza and Leibniz are both anti-essentialists; they believe that the modality of objects can vary relative to how those objects are conceived. This shared commitment to anti-essentialism allows them to consistently affirm both necessitarianism and its denial, relative to different ways of conceiving the world. Their embrace of this modal theory, I further argue, is grounded in their similar views on metaphysical perfection, ontological plentitude, and the principle of sufficient reason. (shrink)

In this two-part series, I explore some of the most important and influential interpretations of Spinoza as an idealist. In this second part, I turn to more recent idealistic interpretations of Spinoza, including the important British idealist school (including Pollock, Martineau, Joachim, and John Caird) at the turn of the 20th century to a very recent and important kind of idealist reading found in the work of Michael Della Rocca.

Most discussions of Spinoza and consciousness—and there are not many— conclude either that he does not have an account of consciousness, or that he does have one but that it is at best confused, at worst hopeless. I argue, in fact, that people have been looking in the wrong place for Spinoza's account of consciousness, namely, at his doctrine of "ideas of ideas". Indeed, Spinoza offers the possibility of a fairly sophisticated, naturalistic account of consciousness, one that grounds it in (...) the nature and capacities of the body. Consciousness for Spinoza, I suggest, is a certain complexity in thinking that is the correlate of the complexity of a body, and human consciousness, for Spinoza, is nothing but the correlate in Thought of the extraordinarily high complexity of the human body in Extension. In this respect, Spinoza anticipates the conception of mind that is presently emerging from studies in the so-called ‘embodied mind’ research program. Moreover, this research program, in turn, may hold out hope for a clearer understanding of some of Spinoza's more difficult claims. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that despite undeniable fundamental differences between Descartes’ and Spinoza’s accounts of human action, there are some striking similarities between their views on right action, moral motivation, and virtue that are usually overlooked. I will argue, first, that both thinkers define virtue in terms of activity or freedom, mutatis mutandis, and thus in terms of actual power of acting. Second, I will claim that both Descartes and Spinoza hold a non-consequentialist approach to virtue, by which human (...) actions are evaluated as virtuous or good on the basis of their motivational forces rather than their consequences. I will show further that both philosophers identify virtue qua free action with the highest good, and thus with that which is to be sought for its own sake and not as a means to anything preferable to it. (shrink)

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 (...) ideas, or the minds such ideas compose. While it is initially tempting to locate the details of such an account in Spinoza's views on the relation between the mental and physical domains, I argue here that such approaches fail, in conflicting with Spinoza's insistence that the mental and the physical are conceptually and explanatorily independent. By contrast, I show that for Spinoza, each idea essentially possesses the property of affirming the existence of its object, and that such properties are well-suited to serve as the principle of ideal individuation Spinoza never explicitly provided. (shrink)

Spinoza's causal axiom is at the foundation of the Ethics. I motivate, develop and defend a new interpretation that I call the ‘causally restricted interpretation’. This interpretation solves several longstanding puzzles and helps us better understand Spinoza's arguments for some of his most famous doctrines, including his parallelism doctrine and his theory of sense perception. It also undermines a widespread view about the relationship between the three fundamental, undefined notions in Spinoza's metaphysics: causation, conception and inherence.

In this paper, I suggest an outline of a new interpretation of core issues in Spinoza’s metaphysics and philosophy of mind. I argue for three major theses. (1) In the first part of the paper I show that the celebrated Spinozistic doctrine commonly termed “the doctrine of parallelism” is in fact a confusion of two separate and independent doctrines of parallelism. Hence, I argue that our current understanding of Spinoza’s metaphysics and philosophy of mind is fundamentally flawed. (2) The clarification (...) and setting apart of the two doctrines will also put us in a position to present my second major thesis and address one of the more interesting and enduring problems in Spinoza’s metaphysics: how can the attribute of thought be, on the one hand, isomorphic with any other attribute, and yet, on the other hand, be isomorphic with God himself, who has infinitely many attributes? In the second part of the paper, I present Spinoza’s solution to this problem. I argue that the number and order of modes is the same in all attributes. Yet, modes of Thought, unlike modes of any other attribute, have an infinitely-faceted internal structure so that one and the same idea represents infinitely many modes by having infinitely many facets (or aspects). (3) This new understanding of the inner structure of ideas in Spinoza will lead us to my third thesis in which I explain and solve another old riddle in Spinoza’s metaphysics: his insistence on the impossibility of the human mind knowing any of God’s infinite attributes other than Thought and Extension. In the third part, I show some of the major ramifications of my new interpretation and respond to some important objections. In my conclusion I discuss the philosophical importance of my interpretation. I explain why Spinoza could not embrace reductive idealism in spite of the preeminence he grants to the attribute of Thought. I argue that Spinoza is a dualist -- not a mind-body dualist, as he is commonly conceived to be, but rather a dualist of Thought and Being. Finally, I suggest that Spinoza’s position on the mind-body issue breaks with the traditional categories and ways of addressing the subject by suggesting a view which grants clear primacy to Thought without accepting any idealist reduction of bodies to thought. (shrink)

In his groundbreaking work of 1969, Spinoza's Metaphysics: An Essay in Interpretation, Edwin Curley attacked the traditional understanding of the substance-mode relation in Spinoza, according to which modes inhere in substance. Curley argued that such an interpretation generates insurmountable problems, as had already been claimed by Pierre Bayle in his famous Dictionary entry on Spinoza. Instead of having modes inhere in substance Curley suggested that the modes’ dependence upon substance should be interpreted in terms of (efficient) causation, i.e., as committing (...) Spinoza to nothing over and above the claim that substance is the (efficient) cause of the modes. These bold and fascinating claims generated one of the most important scholarly controversies in Spinoza scholarship of the past thirty-five years. In this paper I argue against Curley’s interpretation and attempt to reestablish the traditional understanding of Spinozistic modes as inhering in God and as predicated of God. I also criticize Curley’s philosophical motivation for suggesting this interpretation. In order to show that, for Spinoza, modes are predicated of - and inhere in - substance, I will proceed in the following manner. First, I will summarize Curley’s arguments against substance-mode inherence and present his alternative interpretation of the substance-mode relation. I will then present what I consider to be the most compelling arguments against Curley’s interpretation. Some of these arguments have already been suggested in the literature of the past thirty years (and by Bayle); however, as far as I know, most of the arguments I will be making are new. In the subsequent section I will respond to objections that Curley and Bayle advance against Spinoza’s view of God as the substratum in which all things inhere. Finally, I will address whether Spinozistic modes are predicated of (and not only inhere in) substance, and whether Spinoza considered modes to be particular properties (or “tropes,” in the jargon of contemporary metaphysics). Since Bayle’s claims will be used both in support of and against Curley’s interpretation, it would be appropriate to say a few introductory words on Bayle’s stance. In his Spinoza entry, Bayle criticizes Spinoza’s claim that all things are modes of God, claiming that it “is the most monstrous hypothesis that could be imagined, the most absurd, and the most diametrically opposed to the most evident notions of our mind.” Bayle, however, has no doubt that when Spinoza claims that all things are modes of God, Spinoza means that all things inhere in God. Curley embraces Bayle’s arguments against Spinoza, but uses them in order to claim that we should not ascribe to Spinoza a view which is allegedly shown by Bayle to be absurd. What we should do, Curley argues, is to reinterpret the substance-mode relation as a relation of causal dependence, which would set Spinoza free from Bayle’s hook. Interestingly, as we shall soon see, Bayle himself discusses and rejects a very similar revisionary interpretation of the substance-mode relation. (shrink)

This study considers Newton's views on space and time with respect to some important ontologies of substance in his period. Specifically, it deals in a philosophico-historical manner with his conception of substance, attribute, existence, to actuality and necessity. I show how Newton links these “features” of things to his conception of God's existence with respect of infinite space and time. Moreover, I argue that his ontology of space and time cannot be understood without fully appreciating how it relates to the (...) nature of Divine existence. In order to establish this, the ontology embodied in Newton's theory of predication is analysed, and shown to be different from the presuppositions of the ontological argument. From the historical point of view Gassendi's influence is stressed, via the mediation of Walter Charleton. Furthermore, Newton's thought on these matters is contrasted with Descartes's and Spinoza's. In point of fact, in his earliest notebook Newton recorded observations on Descartes's version of the ontological argument. Soon, however, he was to oppose the Cartesian conception of the actuality of Divine existence by means of arguments similar to those of Gassendi. Lastly, I suggest that the nature and extent of Henry More's influence on Newton's conception of how God relates to absolute space and time bears further examination. (shrink)

The main purpose of this paper is to argue, against the formalist or hypothetico-deductivist approach now dominant, that God or substance is for Spinoza a discovery, or indeed a kind of revelation. In both TdlE and Ethics, Spinoza affirms substance as the outcome of a search for salvation. He could not have held that a postulate or presupposition, even if thought necessary, can save man through abstract entailment. Indeed, salvation depends on “the quality of the object to which we cling (...) with love”, the object being “the eternal and infinite thing”. (shrink)

Professor Bennett's new book on Spinoza is a notably ambitious one. It i s ambitious in two ways. First, having worked on the book for twenty-five years, Bennett intends a treatment of Spinoza's Ethics at once comprehensive in scope and detailed in analysis. He tells us that his book “expounds and argues with Spinoza's Ethics, in the hope of drawing into the argument philosophers who have not previously brought Spinoza into their work as an energetic collaborator or antagonist”. Second, Bennett (...) claims to have written a book superior to other commentaries in that “The courtly deference which pretends that Spinoza is always or usually right, under some rescuing interpretation is one thing; it is quite another to look to him, as I have throughout this book, as a teacher, one who can help us to see things which we might not have seen for ourselves. This is showing him a deeper respect, but also holding him to a more demanding standard”. (shrink)

An exposition of Spinoza's views of the cause and cure of death. He holds death to be disruption of mind/body which need not involve becoming a corpse; amnesia counts. It follows that his criterion of personal identity includes memory, so Spinozistic immortality is impersonal. The cause of death is always something external, for nothing can destroy itself. (This principle, however, is not universally true; Spinoza was led to it by mistaken physics.) Suicide is irrational. Fear of death is to be (...) overcome by realization that since adequate ideas are eternal, to the extent that they consitute our minds we are eternal also. (But if so, isn't suicide rational after all? And since language depends on memory, the eternal understanding of adequate ideas is non-linguistic and non-symbolic; what then can it be?). (shrink)

This paper examines the coherence of Spinoza’s combined account of freedom, reason, and the affects and its applicability to real humans in the context of the perfectly free man Spinoza discusses towards the end of part 4 of the Ethics. On the standard reading, the perfectly free man forms the model of human nature and thus the goal to which real humans should aspire. A recently proposed non-standard reading, however, posits that the perfectly free man should not be considered the (...) model of human nature. Consolidating FRA into a system of ten theses and outlining their intricate interconnections, I argue that under both the standard and non-standard readings of Spinoza’s perfectly free man, FRA founders when applied to real humans. While it is no big news that FRA may face deep problems when applied to real humans, the paper is innovative: in the specific tensions in FRA it exposes; in the strategy deployed to expose the latter; and in showing that a recent non-standard approach to resolving these tensions is unsuccessful. Depending on the specific reading of FRA that I suggest, my critical conclusions may not apply to every reading of FRA. They nonetheless pose a serious challenge to similar readings prominent within the literature. (shrink)

Spinoza's remarks about consciousness in the Ethics constitute two theories about conscious experience and knowledge. Several remarks, including 3p9 and 4p8, make the point that self knowledge—an especially valuable good for Spinoza—is not available to introspection. We are, as a matter of course, conscious of ourselves, but we do not, as a matter of course, know ourselves. A second group of remarks, all of which occur in part 5 of the Ethics, emphasizes a different point about consciousness and knowledge: the (...) knowledge that distinguishes the minds of the most powerful or virtuous people is conscious. The characterization of human consciousness that underlies both theories is best understood as one on which a wide variety of ideas in human minds are conscious, and the intensity or degree of consciousness of a given idea is a function of its power. For human minds, because the power of any idea derives from the power of its causes and because many ideas have external causes, there are no grounds for taking the intensity of conscious experience to track a mind's power closely. Rather, as the second group of remarks suggests, power in a human mind tracks the degree to which knowledge characterizes a mind's conscious states. (shrink)

This paper consists of four sections. The first section considers what the proof of necessitarianism in Spinoza's system requires. Also in the first section, Jonathan Bennett's (1984) reading of 1p16 as involving a commitment to necessitarianism is presented and accepted. The second section evaluates Bennett's suggestion how Spinoza might have been led to conclude necessitarianism from his basic assumptions. The third section of the paper is devoted to Don Garrett's (1991) interpretation of Spinoza's proof. I argue that Bennett's and Garrett's (...) interpretations of Spinoza's necessitarianism have short-comings which justify an attempt to offer an alternative proof. In the proof given in the fourth section, it is argued that Spinoza derived necessitarianism from the conjunction of the following principles: (i) necessary existence of the substances; (ii) substance-property ontology; (iii) superessentialism; and (iv) the 'no shared attribute' thesis. (shrink)

The paper offers a new account of Spinoza's conception of “substance”, the fundamental building block of reality. It shows that it can be demonstrated apriori within Spinoza's metaphysical framework that (i) contrary to Idealist readings, for Spinoza there can be no substance that is not determined or modified by some other entity produced by substance; and that (ii) there can be no substance (and hence no being) that is not a thinking substance.

The famous Cartesian Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715) espoused the occasionalist doctrine that ‘there is only one true cause because there is only one true God; that the nature or power of each thing is nothing but the will of God; that all natural causes are not true causes but only occasional causes’ (LO, 448, original italics). One of Malebranche’s well-known arguments for occasionalism, known as, the ‘no necessary connection’ argument (or, NNC ) stems from the principle that ‘a true cause… is (...) one such that the mind perceives a necessary connection between it and its effect’ (LO, 450). The outline of this paper is as follows. I explicitly layout NNC and articulate some of its prima facie strengths (§1). I then critically discuss, what I take to be, the two main arguments against NNC of the Lee-Pyle interpretation (§2). The main conclusion from (§2) is that Malebranche did not abandon NNC in his later works given textual evidence from the Dialogues, contrary to the Lee-Pyle interpretation. In (§3) I discuss in what ways Suárez, Leibniz, Régis and Spinoza all accepted the main premise of NNC. Then, I rebut Steven Nadler’s influential and unchallenged criticism that Malebranche conflated causal and logical necessity, and provide a more accurate interpretation of Malebranche that only commits him to a partial reduction of causal to logical necessity (§4). (shrink)

En esta conferencia se sostiene que el intento de retrotraer la política en Spinoza a sucesos describibles físicamente, que se puede leer en el texto homónimo de A. Matheron, es falso. La presentación tratará la ontología de Spinoza: se quiere mostrar que ella no se puede interpretar físicamente. La interpretación se dirige igualmente contra la hipótesis de J. Bennett en su libro A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics, para quien la filosofía de Spinoza es interpretada bajo la prioridad del atributo extensión (...) y, con ello, según un modelo físico. (shrink)

In this article I dispute the claim, made by several contemporary scholars, that Spinoza was a naturalist. ‘Naturalism’ here refers to two distinct but related positions in contemporary philosophy. The first, ontological naturalism, is the view that everything that exists possesses a certain character permitting it to be defined as natural and prohibiting it from being defined as supernatural. I argue that the only definition of ontological naturalism that could be legitimately applied to Spinoza's philosophy is so unrestrictive as to (...) tell us nothing about the content of his ideas. The second, methodological naturalism, is the view that the natural sciences are the best means of finding out substantial truths about the concrete world. I present some historical research showing that Spinoza's way of positioning himself with respect to other philosophers in the Dutch Republic casts very serious doubt on the claim that he was a methodological naturalist. This adds further weight to arguments that have already been made against the naturalist reading of Spinoza. (shrink)

Dual aspect theory has conceptual advantages over alternative mind-body notions, but difficulties of its own. The nature of the underlying psychophysical ground, for one, remains problematic either in terms of the principle of complementarity or if mind and matter are taken to be aspects of something like energy, movement, or information. Moreover, for a dual aspect theory to be plausible it should avoid the four perils of all mind-body theories: epiphenomenalism, reductionism, gross panpsychism, and the problems of emergence. An alternative (...) dual aspect theory, patterned process theory, is introduced and defended in neurological and individuality terms. The concept is grounded in a brain model of hierarchies wherein consciousness is conceived to be a cognitive aspect of the highest emergent brain inter-module activity, which is situated in the context of a living organism coping with a changing environment. The notion of individuals as psychophysical units unfolding as patterned processes is shown to constitute an integrative approach to brain, consciousness, and behavior that can avoid the conceptual perils and meet the ontological requirements of dual aspect reality and thereby advance the foundations of an integrative mind-body science. (shrink)

Thinking with Spinoza about education involves thinking with and beyond his authored texts, situating his work within the tradition of Western thought, and exploring his contribution to the philoso...

Spinoza’s claim that self-preservation is the foundation of virtue makes for the point of departure of this philosophical investigation into what a Spinozistic model of moral education might look like. It is argued that Spinoza’s metaphysics places constraints on moral education insofar as an educational account would be affected by Spinoza’s denial of the objectivity of moral knowledge, his denial of the existence of free will, and of moral responsibility. This article discusses these challenges in some detail, seeking to construe (...) a credible account of moral education based on the insight that self-preservation is not at odds with benevolence, but that the self-preservation of the teacher is instead conditioned by the intellectual deliberation of the students. However, it is also concluded that while benevolence retains an important place in Spinoza’s ethics, his causal determinism poses a severe threat to a convincing account of moral education insofar as moral education is commonly understood to involve an effort to influence the actions of students relative to some desirable goal. (shrink)

Russell’s critique of substance monism is an ideal starting point from which to understand some main concepts in Spinoza’s difficult metaphysics. This paper provides an in-depth examination of Spinoza’s proof that only one substance exists. On this basis, it rejects Russell’s interpretation of Spinoza’s theory of reality as founded upon the logical doctrine that all propositions consist of a predicate and a subject. An alternative interpretation is offered: Spinoza’s substance is not a bearer of properties, as Russell implied, but an (...) eternally active, self-actualizing creative power. Eventually, Spinoza the Monist and Russell the Pluralist are at one in holding that process and activity rather than enduring things are the most fundamental realities. (shrink)