The Substantial Essence in Spinoza's Ontological Argument

Abstract

Spinoza is standardly thought to understand a being whose essence involves existence as a being that necessarily exists. God exists because His nature says so, with nary an argument for His nature. I argue that this interpretation is mistaken, and that Spinoza includes between his definition of God and argument for His necessary existence an argument for the necessity of His essence. Spinoza then provides three a priori arguments for God's existence that rely crucially on His essence, and his second and third arguments illustrate the mechanism by which God's essence necessitates God. God's essence, I argue, plays a considerably stronger role in Spinoza's ontological argument than scholars have typically understood.