According to the unrestricted version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), every truth has an explanation. I argue that there is defeasible methodological justification for belief in an unrestricted PSR. The argument is based on considerations about our cognitive limitations. It is possible that our cognitive limitations prevent us from even recognizing the explanatorily open character of some propositions we can now represent: the fact that these propositions are explicable in the first place. If this is the case, then (...) a proper recognition of our limitations and a standing goal of reasoning to attain complete explanatory knowledge justify the adoption of an unrestricted PSR. (shrink)

Spinoza claims that a person’s mind and body are one and the same. But he also claims that minds think and do not move, whereas bodies move and do not think. How can we reconcile these claims? I believe that Spinoza is building on a traditional view about identity over time. According to this view, identity over time is linked to essence, so that a thing that is now resting is identical to a thing that was previously moving, provided that (...) they share the same essence. I believe that Spinoza has a similar view about the identity of minds and bodies. In particular, a thing that is thinking in the attribute of thought is identical to a thing that is moving in the attribute of extension, provided that they share the same essence. (shrink)

The immediate occasion for this special issue was Christia Mercer’s influential paper “The Contextualist Revolution in Early Modern Philosophy”. In her paper, Mercer clearly demarcates two methodologies of the history of early modern philosophy. She argues that there has been a silent contextualist revolution in the past decades, and the reconstructivist methodology has been abandoned. One can easily get the impression that ‘reconstructivist’ has become a pejorative label that everyone outright rejects. Mercer’s examples of reconstructivist historians of philosophy are deceased (...) (P. F. Strawson, Margaret J. Osler, Richard Watson, and Bernard Williams), anonymous (the fans of philosopher* mentioned by Lisa Downing), or authors whose more recent work followed a contextualist methodology (Jonathan Bennett). The reconstructivist camp seems to have turned into a shadowy group, largely extinct by now, not unlike the Death Eaters in the fictional universe of Harry Potter. There are some figures who previously belonged to this group, but they have since reformed their ways – or so it seems. Sometimes it is rumoured that certain people may still have secret allegiance to it, but no one dares to fly its banner openly. We decided to create this special issue because we believe that reconstructivist methodology does not deserve this shadowy existence. (shrink)

I examine the (mediated) correspondence between Spinoza and Robert Boyle concerning the latter’s account of fluidity and his experiments on reconstitution of niter in the light of the epistemology and doctrine of method contained in the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect. I argue that both the Treatise and the correspondence reveal that for Spinoza, the proper method of science is not experimental, and that he accepted a powerful under-determination thesis. I argue that, in contrast to modern versions, Spinoza’s (...) form of naturalism was a highly rationalist and anti-empirical one. I conclude with a brief account of the value of experience and experimentation for Spinoza’s scientific method. (shrink)

Este libro, por un lado, propone nuevas perspectivas y materiales de estudio sobre algunos de los temas, autores y textos clásicos de la filosofía moderna; por otro lado, invita a descubrir rarezas, temas, autores y textos poco conocidos o ignorados, que lleven a renovar el canon de la filosofía moderna. Realiza una revisión crítica de las categorías empirismo y del racionalismo modernos y dedica artículos a una serie de filósofas modernas con el fin de renovar el canon filosófico moderno.

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)

Many philosophers have appealed to the PSR in arguments for a being that exists a se, a being whose explanation is in itself. But what does it mean, exactly, for something to have its explanation ‘in itself’? Contemporary philosophers have said next to nothing about this, relying instead on phrases plucked from the accounts of various historical figures. In this article, I analyse five such accounts – those of Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz – and argue that none are (...) satisfactory. Should we abandon or restrict the PSR, then? I think that would be hasty, for many reasons. I therefore consider the prospects of explaining everything, including God, given the constraints of certain features of good explanations, and conclude with several observations about future approaches. (shrink)

Genevieve Lloyd’s Spinoza is quite a different thinker from the arch rationalist caricature of some undergraduate philosophy courses devoted to “The Continental Rationalists”. Lloyd’s Spinoza does not see reason as a complete source of knowledge, nor is deductive rational thought productive of the highest grade of knowledge. Instead, that honour goes to a third kind of knowledge—intuitive knowledge (scientia intuitiva), which provides an immediate, non-discursive knowledge of its singular object. To the embarrassment of some hard-nosed philosophers, intellectual intuition has an (...) affective component; it is a form of love, and ultimately given that human beings are finite modes of God/Nature (Deus sive Natura), it is a form of the intellectual love of God (amor Dei intellectualis). Some philosophers do not know what to make of this mysterious aspect of Spinoza’s philosophy, which is nonetheless firmly anchored in a reading of Part V of the Ethics. Nonetheless, this note will insist with Lloyd’s “Reconsidering Spinoza’s Rationalism” that such doctrine is an integral part of Spinoza’s philosophy. Moreover, it will be shown that Spinoza is well aware of the limitations of reason (ratio) in gaining scientific knowledge of the world and requires intuition precisely because of the inability of reason to represent individuals in their full particularity. Imagination too has a role to play in shaping scientific knowledge, although reason performs a vital critical role in disciplining and liberating the human mind from inadequate imaginary ideas. The result is an interpretation of Spinoza’s epistemology as both rationalist and intuitionist. DOI: 10.1080/24740500.2021.1962652. (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)

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.

The Principle of Sufficient Reason is a powerful and controversial philosophical principle stipulating that everything must have a reason or cause. This simple demand for thoroughgoing intelligibility yields some of the boldest and most challenging theses in the history of metaphysics and epistemology. In this entry we begin with explaining the Principle, and then turn to the history of the debates around it. A section on recent discussions of the Principle will be added in the near future.

In this essay, I evaluate four central metaethical readings of Spinoza’s moral philosophy in the literature: unqualified anti-realism, qualified anti-realism, qualified realism, and unqualified realism. More specifically, I discuss the metaethical readings of Charles Jarrett (unqualified anti-realism), Matthew Kisner (qualified anti-realism), Jon Miller (qualified realism), and Andrew Youpa (unqualified realism), each of which captures core aspects of this debate. My conclusions are that (1) Spinoza is neither an unqualified anti-realist nor an unqualified realist and (2) Spinoza’s ethical framework represents a (...) qualified synthesis of realist (naturalistic) and anti-realist (affective) features. (shrink)

In this paper I clarify a major affinity between Nietzsche and Spinoza that has been neglected in the literature—but that Nietzsche was aware of—namely a tendency to what I call etiology. Etiologies provide second- order explanations of some opponents’ first-order views, but not in order to decide first-order matters. The example I take up here is Nietzsche’s and Spinoza’s rejections of free will—and especially their etiologies concerning how we wrongly come to think that we may boast of such a capacity. (...) In working through the former (i.e., their rejections of free will) in order to make my central metaphilosophical point regarding the latter (i.e., their accounts of why we generally affirm that we have free will), I shed important new light on Nietzsche’s relation to Spinoza. I also further our understanding of what role such second-order accounts play within each of their larger projects on their own terms. (shrink)

Resumo: Mesmo que neguemos qualquer tipo de excepcionalismo à filosofia como empreendimento intelectual (ver Williamson, 2007), parece fácil conceder que, pelo menos no que diz respeito às relações com sua própria história, a filosofia é diferente de outros campos do conhecimento (ver Williamson, 2018). No entanto, questões relacionadas ao escopo, papel e validade da história da filosofia para a atividade filosófica são tão antigas quanto a própria filosofia, além de se tornarem relevantes no chamado parting of ways entre as tendências (...) analítica e hermenêutico-fenomenológica. No entanto, é possível dizer que, pelo menos desde a segunda metade do último século, temos visto uma inflexão importante sobre o lugar e a importância da história da filosofia na filosofia contemporânea: tanto por causa da “virada histórica” na filosofia analítica, com obras de Strawson, Sellars e, mais recentemente, Brandom, servindo como bons exemplos desse movimento, quanto pelo interesse recentemente renovado em questões de metafilosofia. Um exemplo desse segundo movimento é o debate entre os chamados apropriacionistas e os contextualistas. Portanto, este artigo tem como objetivo analisar os dois principais argumentos contra as reconstruções racionais - o GTRC e a acusação de anacronismo - e oferecer uma defesa de uma abordagem inferencialista para a história da filosofia, com base no trabalho de Robert Brandom, que é simultaneamente aberto a certo contextualismo, bem como estabelece parâmetros para as reconstruções racionais. (shrink)

This essay considers two concepts of repetition in thinking about canon, the history of ideas, and the work of an opponent, both real and fantastical. I take up these motifs in a variety of figures and cases, but principally in Søren Kierkegaard’s reading of the biblical Abraham in Fear and Trembling, a text rich in interpretive challenges. How might readers in the humanities contend with interpretive rivals while investing in the power of diverse readings? The argument turns on the relationship (...) between the struggle for self‐consciousness, understood through Hegel and Freud as an appointment with otherness, and the work of interpretation, understood as the endeavor to understand others, including other texts, other minds, and one’s own mind. What is the aim of interpretation? How does interpretation fail? To which history of ideas is a reader responsible? (shrink)

The paper studies the historical background for the ‘idealist’ reading of Spinoza usually traced back to British and German Idealism. Here, I follow this history further back than and focus on one earlier idealist reading, indeed perhaps the mother of them all. It can be found in the _Elucidarius cabalisticus, sive reconditae Hebraeorum philosophiae brevis et succincta recensio_ by Johann Georg Wachter, a kabbalist interpretation of Spinoza published in 1706. I am principally interested in the importance that Wachter’s book may (...) have had for German philosophy in the second half of the eighteenth century. Focusing on Moses Mendelssohn’s _Philosophische Gespräche_ of 1755, I argue that, via Mendelssohn, the Elucidarius cabalisticus is perhaps the earliest possible source of the idealist reading of Spinoza that dominated the German _Spinozabild_ from throughout the _Pantheismusstreit_ up to the second edition of Herder’s 1800 _Gott: Einige Gespräche_, culminating with Hegel’s ‘acosmist’ reading of Spinoza in the 1825–26 lectures on the history of philosophy. (shrink)

The Amsterdam theater society Nil Volentibus Arduum, which was founded in 1669 and remained active for some years, was not just a circle meeting regularly to discuss theater theory and practice, but was devoted to discussion of all the arts as well as language theory in relation to society. As far as the Amsterdam theater was concerned, its main purpose was to try to raise the level and provide more of a moral and socially improving direction to the stage. Arguably, (...) also, it had a certain impact on discussion and theorizing about late Dutch Golden Age painting. Two of its most active members, Lodewijk Meyer and Johannes Bouwmeester, were among the closest friends and allies of Spinoza. Opponents and detractors of the society took to associating it in the public mind with the “atheist” Spinoza. This article seeks to understand the theoretical concerns of the society and assess its relationship to its broader Dutch context and to Spinoza and Spinozism. (shrink)