Identity and Distinction in Spinoza's ETHICS1

Revista Seiscentos, 2021

In this paper, I inspect the grounds for the mature Spinozist argument for substance monism. The argument is succinctly stated at Ethics Part 1, Proposition 14. The argument appeals to two explicit premises: (1) that there must be a substance with all attributes; (2) that substances cannot share their attributes. In conjunction with a third implicit premise, that a substance cannot not have any attribute whatsoever, Spinoza infers that there can be no more than one substance. I begin the inspection with the analysis of the first premise, which is provided in the form of the four proofs of God’s existence in Ethics Part 1, Proposition 11. While demonstrating how Spinoza adopts a progressive approach, where the fourth proof of God’s existence is more successful and persuasive than the third, which is more successful than the second, etc., I also unpack concepts central to Spinoza’s thinking here, including the concepts of reason (ratio) and power (potesta or potentia). I then analyze the second premise of the Spinozist argument for substance monism, as established by Ethics Part 1, Proposition 4 in conjunction with Ethics Part 1, Proposition 5. I take up and respond to the objection attributed to Leibniz that a substance p can have the attributes x and y and a substance q can have the attributes y and z, and thus that substances can share some attributes while remaining distinct. Throughout the study, my attention is focused on the argumentative procedures Spinoza adopts. This yields a close, internalist reading of the text where Spinoza effectively embraces substance monism. In conclusion to this study, I underscore to the originality of Spinoza’s argument for seventeenth century theories of substance. Keywords: Spinoza; substance monism; proofs of God’s existence; individuation. https://revistas.ufrj.br/index.php/seiscentos/issue/view/1813

In Y. Melamed (ed.), The Young Spinoza (Oxford UP, forthcoming)., 2015

We are accustomed to think of Spinoza's definitions of God, Substance and Attribute as fixed and settled formulations of the core of Spinoza’s metaphysics, but if we look at the development of Spinoza’s thought, the picture we get is quite different. In the early drafts of the Ethics and in his early works, Spinoza seems to have experimented with various conceptualizations of the relations between substance, attribute, and God. Some of Spinoza’s works make barely any use of the notions of substance and attribute, and the testimony of Spinoza’s letters suggests that, at a certain stage in his philosophical development, the concept of attribute may have been put on the back burner, if not completely dropped. In this paper I will attempt to provide a brief outline of the genealogy of Spinoza’s key metaphysical concepts. This genealogy, like any other, can help us to reexamine and reconsider what seems to us natural, stable and obvious. In the first part of the paper, I rely on Spinoza’s letters to trace the development of his definitions of substance and attribute in the early drafts of the Ethics. The letters, whose dates are more or less established, also provide a temporal grid for our subsequent discussions. The second part surveys Spinoza’s discussion and conceptualization of substance and attributes in the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, the Theological-Political Treatise (1670), and briefly, Spinoza’s 1663 book on Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy, and its appendix on Metaphysical Thoughts, the Cogitata Metaphysica. The third part of the paper is dedicated to Spinoza’s understanding of substance and attribute in the Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being. I conclude with some remarks on the stability of Spinoza’s final position on the issue, as expressed in the published version of the Ethics

Philosophy Compass, 2006

Some of Spinoza's most well-known doctrines concern what kinds of beings there are and how they are related to each other. For example, he claims that: (1) there is only one substance; (2) this substance has infinitely many attributes; (3) this substance is God or nature; (4) each of these attributes express the divine essence; and (5) all else is a mode of the one substance. These claims have so astonished many of his readers that some of them have surely concluded that they must not know what Spinoza means by “substance,”“attribute,” and “mode.” In this article I shall try to explain how Spinoza understands the basic ontological categories denoted by these expressions.

History of Philosophy & Logical Analysis

In this paper, I address the issue of what kind of distinction separates the attributes of Spinoza's substance. I propose to consider the distinction between attributes neither as a real distinction nor as a pure distinction of reason. Instead, I ventilate the alternative of understanding attributes as distinguished by a hybrid distinction, of which I trace the development during the Medieval and Early Modern eras. With the term hybrid, I capture distinctions which are neither a real distinction between substances or real accidents; nor a pure distinction of reason, produced or fabricated by the intellect. I shall argue that Spinoza’s notion of attribute falls under the scope of a hybrid distinction, thus sidestepping the longstanding debate between objectivism and subjectivism.

ProQuest, 2020

Spinoza’s doctrine of parallelism admits of certain observed inconsistencies that have long troubled Spinoza scholars. The scholarship over the last one hundred and thirty years or so has offered three dominant interpretations of Spinoza’s metaphysics as a result of the deficiencies with the doctrine of parallelism. These are 1) the subjective/objective distinction according to which the attribute of thought is understood as subjective and the attribute of extension is understood as objective, 2) materialism according to which the attribute of thought is claimed to depend on the attribute of extension, and 3) idealism according to which the attribute of extension is claimed to depend on the attribute of thought. A tension between materialism and idealism is addressed by each of these approaches. And the question of Spinozist idealism is of great concern to contemporary Spinoza scholarship. However, none of these interpretations succeed as they each fail to properly locate Spinoza’s problems with parallelism in a deeper attribute problem. Interpretations 1 and 2 fail more severely for also clashing with other central themes of Spinoza’s project such as his ethics which prioritizes thought at the expense of extension. This dissertation observes that the interpretive trends in the literature not only do not succeed but cannot succeed as Spinoza’s system admits of certain contradictions. Of primary consideration, and beyond the problems with parallelism, conflation of attribute with substance and conflation of attribute with mode. It being the case that Spinoza’s theory of attributes is deficient, I propose a revisionist approach to what I have termed Spinoza’s “deep attribute problem” according to which the attributes are disassociated from the active/passive distinction. The active/passive distinction is shown to be instrumental in tying Spinoza’s metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics together as well as being erroneously applied to the attributes. The proposed revision is that the attributes be disassociated from the active/passive distinction which is to be understood now in terms of a vertical and horizontal association. The vertical association identifies substance-mode relations and the horizontal association identifies mode-mode relations. An important consequence of this revision is that substance is recast as absolutely infinite intellectual substance. As such, Spinoza’s revised system is ontological idealism and it is suggested but left for future research that the revision may entail un understanding of Spinoza’s system too as modal existentialism and ethical mysticism.

Oxford Handbook of Spinoza, 2017

This chapter provides an outline of the main philosophical and interpretative problems involved in Spinoza's key concepts: Substance, Attribute, and Modes. Spinoza's God has infinitely many qualities that constitute, or are adequately conceived as constituting, his essence, while the other qualities of Spinoza's God, though not constituting God's essence, follow necessarily from God's essence. Spinoza calls the former "Attributes [attributa]" and the latter "Modes [modi]." Following a clarification of Spinoza's understanding of Substance [substantia] in the first part of this essay, we will study in the second and third parts Spinoza's conception of attributes and modes, respectively.

This article is devoted to one of the crucial problems, if not the most crucial, in Spinoza's philosophy. Nevertheless, we should not ignore the obvious fact that the pluralist-monistic problem can be found at the heart of the vital philosophical debates from the Post-Eleatics and Plato to the present. Parmenides, Zeno, Plato, Aristole, Hegel, Davidson, and Putnam, each emphatically and extensively treats it in his own way. It has a special manifestation in the psychophysical (mind-body) question, which many consider an unsolved, aporetic problem, as well as in that of the relationship among mind, knowledge, and objective reality. Hence, the problem has much to do with the idealistic-realist debate, which is still very much alive. Nowadays, Davidson and Putnam, to name but two, play an intriguing part in these philosophical debates. Some commentators on Spinoza believe that Davidson takes a Spinozistic monistic stance. As we shall soon see, Davidson himself recently characterized his stance as such, but this is not the case at all if my interpretation in this paper is sound. Spinoza adopts a unique position on these problems, and his systematic, coherent answer to the monistic-pluralist question is unique, at least in the European legacy, if not in any philosophical tradition, Western or Eastern. Spinoza should not be considered an idealist, materialist, physicalist, or dual-aspect theorist. None of the ready-made labels can serve us adequately in characterizing his unique stance. Spinoza is only Spinozist.

This article is devoted to one of the crucial problems, if not the most crucial, in Spinoza's philosophy. Nevertheless, we should not ignore the obvious fact that the pluralist-monistic problem can be found at the heart of the vital philosophical debates from the Post-Eleatics and Plato to the present. Parmenides, Zeno, Plato, Aristole, Hegel, Davidson, and Putnam, each emphatically and extensively treats it in his own way. It has a special manifestation in the psychophysical (mind-body) question, which many consider an unsolved, aporetic problem, as well as in that of the relationship among mind, knowledge, and objective reality. Hence, the problem has much to do with the idealistic-realist debate, which is still very much alive. Nowadays, Davidson and Putnam, to name but two, play an intriguing part in these philosophical debates. Some commentators on Spinoza believe that Davidson takes a Spinozistic monistic stance. As we shall soon see, Davidson himself recently characterized his stance as such, but this is not the case at all if my interpretation in this paper is sound. Spinoza adopts a unique position on these problems, and his systematic, coherent answer to the monistic-pluralist question is unique, at least in the European legacy, if not in any philosophical tradition, Western or Eastern. Spinoza should not be considered an idealist, materialist, physicalist, or dual-aspect theorist. None of the ready-made labels can serve us adequately in characterizing his unique stance. Spinoza is only Spinozist. It has always been a real temptation to adopt a reductionist posture on the psychophysical question as well as on that of mind, knowledge, and objective reality. However, reductionism cannot be an adequate solution, for it renders reality as well as our experience and knowledge of it unbearably poor, shallow, and narrow or restricted. On the other hand, nonreductionist views, especially dualism, have real difficulty in tackling these questions. At least until now, dualist approaches have rendered them aporetic problems. Dualism does not provide adequate answers; it is problematic in itself and strengthens the problematic, aporetic nature of the aforementioned problems. Spinoza, rejecting almost any possible reductionism in most of the problems he deals with, is therefore not idealist or materialist. If you accept my interpretation of Spinoza's philosophy, you will find that he would reject physicalism of any sort, and most, if not all, of today's philosophical views, including Davidson's. Spinoza thus contributes a unique view of some of the most crucial problems in philosophy in general, and in the European legacy in particular, problems that exercise us enormously nowadays. His stance lives with us as a vital, most real possibility, which no serious thinker may ignore.

2021

‘Substance’ (substantia, zelfstandigheid) is a key term of Spinoza’s philosophy. Like almost all of Spinoza’s philosophical vocabulary, Spinoza did not invent this term, which has a long history that can be traced back at least to Aristotle. Yet, Spinoza radicalized the traditional notion of substance and made a very powerful use of it by demonstrating – or at least attempting to demonstrate -- that there is only one, unique substance -- God (or Nature) -- and that all other things are merely modes or states of God. Some of Spinoza’s readers understood these claims as committing him to the view that only God truly exists, and while this interpretation is not groundless, we will later see that this enticing and bold reading of Spinoza as an ‘acosmist’ comes at the expense of another audacious claim Spinoza advances, i.e., that God/Nature is absolutely and actually infinite. But before we reach this last conclusion, we have a long way to go. So, let me first provide an overview of our plan. In the first section of this paper we will examine Spinoza’s definitions of ‘substance’ and ‘God’ at the opening of his magnum opus, the Ethics. Following a preliminary clarification of these two terms and their relations to the other key terms defined at the beginning of the Ethics, we will briefly address the Aristotelian and Cartesian background of Spinoza’s discussion of substance. In the second section, we will study the properties of the fundamental binary relations pertaining to Spinoza’s substance: inherence, conception, and causation. The third section will be dedicated to a clarification of Spinoza’s claim that God, the unique substance, is absolutely infinite. This essential feature of Spinoza’s substance has been largely neglected in recent Anglo-American scholarship, a neglect which has brought about an unfortunate tendency to domesticate Spinoza’s metaphysics to more contemporary views. The fourth section will study the nature of Spinoza’s monism. It will discuss and criticize the interesting yet controversial views of the eminent Spinoza scholar, Martial Gueroult, about the plurality of substances in the beginning of the Ethics; address Spinoza’s claim in Letter 50 that, strictly speaking, it is improper to describe God as “one”; and, finally, evaluate Spinoza’s kind of monism against the distinction between existence and priority monism recently introduced into the contemporary philosophical literature. The fifth and final section will explain the nature, reality, and manner of existence of modes. We therefore have an ambitious plan; let’s get down to business.