Abstract The question of whether Spinoza's metaphysics qualifies as a version of priority monism is debated in the literature, though the significance of this debate is arguably understated. This article clarifies why it matters for Spinoza scholarship and offers a tentative answer. First, I demonstrate how priority monism is implicitly suggested in the Short Treatise (KV) as a solution to the tension between the unity of substance and the plurality of modes. Second, I propose a new interpretation of Spinoza's mature ontology in the Ethics that explains how and why he distanced himself from this earlier priority monism. Contrary to the prevailing narrative that Spinoza's mature metaphysics is simply not priority monism, I offer a textual defense of the possibility that Spinoza self‐consciously abandoned it by discovering a superior solution to the aforementioned metaphysical puzzle that had troubled him in the Short Treatise.

This article introduces a formal mathematical framework inspired by Spinoza's metaphysics to model reality as a unified, deterministic system of cause and effect. Drawing from Spinoza's concepts of Substance, Attributes, and Modes, we construct a generative architecture capable of both representing known structures of reality (e.g., space, thought, time) and exploring new domains (e.g., artificial cognition, emergent systems). The model is based on a central causal chain, expressed through infinite synchronized attributes, and provides a rigorous platform for both metaphysical clarity and scientific application.

Spinoza's philosophy presents a radical reinterpretation of miracles and laws, rejecting traditional views of miracles as breaches in the natural order. This paper argues that for Spinoza, natural law, which directly follows from God, governs the universe with necessity, while civil and physical laws are human inventions. Some events are considered miracles because they contradict the latter laws due to people's ignorance of the true causes. By analyzing Spinoza's typology of laws and his views on extension, I contend that physical laws depend on human imagination and thus cannot be equated with natural law. The paper examines Spinoza's rejection of miracles as supernatural events, demonstrating how they instead reveal the limits of human understanding of natural causality. This study reconciles Spinoza's rationalist commitments with his critique of human cognition's capacity to represent the divine. This rethinking of laws and miracles offers new insights into Spinoza's metaphysics and its implications for his philosophy of science and theology.

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 Curley's argument, showing that Spinoza's remarks on infinite modes entail that finite modes can in no sense be contingent. But this alone falls short of dispelling Curley's misgivings about the standard interpretation, for it remains unexplained why Curley is wrong in thinking that the proposition 28 supports his moderate necessitarian interpretation. In defense of the standard interpretation, I bolster the usual response to Curley in greater detail than has been done in the literature and explain why, pace Curley, the proposition 28 plays no evidential role in support of Curley's interpretation.

Abstract Trope theory and Spinoza's metaphysics apparently present two incompatible ontological landscapes. Spinoza assigns a strong metaphysical priority to a grounding substance and describes common objects as adjectival upon such substance. By contrast, several contemporary trope theories attempt to reduce all substances (both universal and particular) to bundles of individual properties. In this article, I motivate, defend, and develop a compatible reading of Spinozism and trope theories. This interpretation provides new reasons to take seriously some of the most controversial of Spinoza's claims, such as its monism and its commitment to universal necessity. Moreover, my interpretation undermines some classical objections against trope theories, such as their unwarranted multiplication of metaphysical objects, and their commitment to a description of objects based on necessary sets of their properties.

Bu çalışmada Kant ve Spinoza felsefeleri arasındaki ilişki ele alınmıştır. Belirli bir konsensusa göre Kant Spinoza felsefesi ile çok fazla ilgilenmemektedir. Ancak çalışma Kant’ın Spinoza’yı felsefe tarihinde özel bir yere konumlandırdığını savunacaktır. Kant’a göre akıl koşullu mevcudiyetin imkanını açıklarken belirli bir düşünsel silsileyi takip etmek zorundadır. Buna göre akıl önce koşulsuza ulaşmalı oradan da koşullu mevcudiyetin imkanını kurmalıdır. Ancak bu zorunluluk koşullu ve koşulsuz arasında belirli bir ilişkiyi varsaymaktadır. Makale, Kant açısından Spinoza’nın metafiziğinin felsefe tarihinde aklın geçmek zorunda olduğu bu uğrakları en tutarlı biçimde serimleyen felsefe olduğunu savunacaktır. Şüphesiz Kant için aşkınsal realizm aklın düştüğü bir illüzyondur. Ancak bu illüzyon olumsal değil zorunlu bir illüzyondur. Bir diğer değişle, aklı bu hataya sürükleyen şey bizzat aklın kendi yapısıdır. Bu nedenle bu hatadan kaçınmanın tek yolu aklın bilme iddialarına meşruiyetini sorgulayan aşkınsal idealizm felsefesidir. Ancak, yine de, eğer akıl koşulsuzu bir bilgi nesnesi olarak ele alacaksa sonuç Spinoza metafiziği olacaktır. Bir diğer deyişle, Kant açısından Spinoza felsefesi aşkınsal realizmin zorunlu sonucudur.

In this essay I intend to describe how Spinoza’s pantheism represents a consistent development of Descartes’ epistemology. While the fundamental starting point of Descartes’ epistemology is the self-certainty, from which the existence of God is deduced, that eventually guarantees the existence of the world outside of the doubting subject, Spinoza’s epistemology is based on the considerations of certain meanings, primarily of the meaning of ‘substance.’ Nevertheless, Spinoza’s metaphysics, as we are going to see, expands on the main Cartesian notions. The main difference is that Spinoza continues Cartesian reasoning in a univocal manner, while Descartes restrains himself from challenging the tradition by insisting on equivocity of all meanings concerning God.

The Explainability of Experience: Realism and Subjectivity in Spinoza's Theory of the Human Mind by Ursula Renz first appeared in German (Renz 2010) and was awarded the Journal of the History of Philosophy Book Prize in 2011. It was translated by the author into English. The first, but not the only, admirable feature of the book is that it does not read as a translation. The long wait for the translation was indeed well worthwhile.One of the more striking features of Spinoza's metaphysics is that its most fundamental doctrines have been interpreted in diametrically opposing ways. A canonical example is Spinoza's being accused of being a materialist and atheist (see, e.g., Conway 1996: chap. 9) only to be interpreted later as an idealist and accused of denying any reality to finite things (as did Hegel; see, e.g., Hegel 2010: 328). A second but not independent example is the well-established debate as to the nature of the attributes of substance, as either objective or subjective. Recent scholarship has by and large favored, and with some notable exceptions, a realist, objectivist interpretation of Spinoza's metaphysics. A cornerstone of this interpretative thrust is to take the sub specie aeternitatis perspective, or, more colloquially, God's point of view as the paradigm of knowledge. That is to say, it favors what might be called a divine epistemology over a human one. An important function of the divine epistemology for this kind of interpretation is securing the coveted objectivity and realism for Spinoza's metaphysics. Commentators, thus, have been reluctant to place the human mind at the center of Spinoza's epistemology. This tendency can be traced to their linking the human view point with the merely subjective and therefore illusory. Consequently, the human point of view is seen as undermining the desired results of objectivity and metaphysical realism.Against this backdrop, one can come to appreciate the originality and courage of Renz's interpretation. Renz boldly aims to make the human mind the epistemic core of Spinoza's epistemology while arguing that he holds a realist metaphysics. The key to this approach is recognizing that Spinoza's rationalism requires that subjective experience be explainable. That there is subjective experience is undeniable, and since it has being it must therefore be explainable. It is helpful to note that on the alternative view, namely, favoring God's point of view, it seems impossible to give a satisfying account of subjective experience.1 On the kind of view Renz argues against, it is constitutive of the divine perspective that it lacks subjectivity. Therefore, even if we were somehow able to derive a limited, human perspective from the divine one, what we would not be able to do is derive a “subjective” point of view—precisely because there is no subjectivity in the divine perspective. One of Renz's major contributions to the scholarly debate is her insistence and meticulous argumentation for the centrality of the human perspective for Spinoza's overall project. Renz describes her own project as developing the thesis that subjective experience is explainable, and looks at Spinoza's Ethics “as a model for a philosophical approach that corroborates our thesis” (12). She describes Spinoza's contribution to the philosophy of mind as offering “an attempt to outline an integrative model of a theory of the human mind, thereby laying the theoretical foundation for the argument that subjective experience—including its biological, historical, epistemic, and social determinants—is explainable” (16).The book is divided into four sections. In the first section Renz explains what she takes to be Spinoza's ontological premises. She argues for three important points. The first is that Spinoza disassociates the concept of substance from that of subject; the second is that the distinction between mode and substance is a categorical one and ought not be understood as an inherence relation; and finally, by looking into the concept of the individual, Renz argues for the surprising conclusion that “a body's individuality is a sufficient condition only for being thought of as animated, not for being attributed a mens” (60). To be a mind and not only an idea requires further that “an individual must be able to relate events to itself and, in conjunction with that, it must be able to have ideas about itself and its bodily affects” (61).The second section of the book is devoted to an articulation of the ontological status of the mental. I take Renz here to offer a subtle double-pronged answer to the idealist. First, Renz correctly argues that in part 2 of the Ethics we do not get a deduction of the human mind from the essence of God. The idealist recognizes that this cannot be done—no finite thing can be deduced from the essence of God, and hence the idealist concludes that finite things can have no being. Renz concludes from this (as I do; see Shein 2020) that saving the reality of the human mind requires that one deny the legitimacy of the deduction of the finite from the infinite. She goes on to argue that “our mental life reflects rather than constitutes the basic structure of reality” (65), and thus avoids collapsing all of reality into thought—another salient consequence of idealist readings of Spinoza.The third section of the book can be seen as motivated by the following general worry: If human minds were merely ideas, that is, modes, that inhere in the divine intellect, there would be no way to explain subjective experience. Furthermore, they would be prone to dissipating into infinite thought, since there would be nothing inherent to them to differentiate them. One of Renz's central claims is that if subjective experience is to be explainable (as required by Spinoza's rationalism), then there has to be more to a mode of thought than being only an idea. More has to be true of it in order for it to be a subject or a mind. This is coupled with careful argumentation that, although we may speak of God as having ideas, God is not a knowing subject. The fundamental intuition here is that experience is always from a particular point of view, and that is precisely what God lacks. A challenging passage for Renz is 2p11c,2 where Spinoza states that the human mind is part of the infinite intellect. Her meticulous discussion of this passage is illuminating and original. She offers a way of reading passages that seem to allude to God as a knowing subject as statements of Spinoza's commitment that all is intelligible, that is, as reflections of his commitment to rationalism and a kind of mental holism. In other words, one need not be forced into attributing paradoxical subjectivity to God; one need admit only that, in principle, all is knowledge.The final section of the book is dedicated to explaining the representational content of the mind. Here we find a careful analysis of the nature of images and affections. Naturally, doing so is the culmination of the project of explaining subjectivity. With this analysis in hand, Renz explains key epistemological concepts, such as common notions, adequacy, and intuitive knowledge, and what it means to produce a successful explanation. She concludes the book by signaling the practical, ethical, and political implications of taking subjective experience to be explainable.I wholeheartedly agree with Renz's keen observation that the human mind cannot be derived from the essence of God. The case can be made more broadly that no finite mode can thusly be deduced.3 Furthermore, I concur that this does not commit Spinoza to idealism. It does, however, require taking subjective experience as fundamental. It is clear that part of what Renz wishes to secure via the focus on subjective experience is the particularity of the subject, all the while acknowledging both that it is enmeshed in an infinite causal network and that the mind takes its body as object. In other words, for Renz, subjective experience points to the finite nature of the mind. Although I agree that this is the case, I take that to be only part of the story. The clearest way to appreciate this is by thinking about bodily sensations. To sense my body as affected in many ways (2a4) is to, at once, both sense how other bodies impinge on my own—that is, determine my body—and sense that my body counterdetermines those bodies. In other words, it is to sense how I actively determine the surrounding bodies. This dual aspect of subjective experience explains not only the sense in which I am determined or finite but also the sense in which I actively determine all the other bodies. This activity, I have argued, can be understood only as a kind of infinity. This dual aspect, rather than focusing only on its finite aspect, helps make better sense of part 5 and the sense in which the mind is eternal.In the preface to the English edition, the author notes that, although the original had come out almost ten years earlier, her position has not deviated, and hence, for the most part, she has not added references to more recent literature. Although this choice is understandable in the face of the daunting translation project, it is somewhat lamentable since recently there has been interesting work done on central issues which Renz discusses. I would have been interested, for example, in seeing Renz's engagement with Alison Peterman's view on Spinoza's extension (Peterman 2015), Sanem Soyarslan's position regarding essences (Soyarslan 2016), Julie Klein's position on Intuitive Knowledge (e.g., Klein 2014), and the work of Karolina Hübner (e.g., Hübner 2015), who has published on many of the same questions the book addresses. This however, does not detract from the fact that the book is an outstanding contribution to the study of Spinoza's epistemology.

The purpose of this research is to analyse two distinct readings of Spinoza's metaphysics made by two great interpreters of the twentieth century: Curley and Wolfson. The first is treated through logical terms and the relation that the propositions of Spinoza's Ethics have among them, explaining the relationship between the author and Cartesianism of his time. The second is treated through a detailed philology of a tradition of texts prior to the author, explaining the relationship beteween Spinoza and the Jewish Medieval Aristotelian tradition.

Abstract This article argues that in The Lifted Veil George Eliot conducts a fictional experiment to test the limits of seventeenth-century philosopher Benedict de Spinoza's metaphysics. Eliot's Gothic novella, a significant generic departure from the realist fiction that established her fame, can arguably be read as a response to Spinoza's theory of the imagination, with its nursery of illusions and fears. Despite Eliot's years of studying and translating Spinoza's two major works, and the influence his philosophy exerted over both herself and George Henry Lewes, there has been a curious tendency to overlook this fundamental intellectual relationship. In The Lifted Veil Eliot does not merely give fictional form to Spinoza's ideas; rather, she contests and reshapes his affective philosophy, setting his intensely optical, phenomenal notion of the subject's enslavement to the vividness of imagination in an incendiary allegory of mid-century Victorian visual culture. The various epistemological crises of the mid-century moment find expression in Eliot's horrifying first-person account of delimited, inescapable sensory experience. What ensues is a destabilizing of the bluntly rational terms upon which Spinoza grounded his vision of the affective imagination, through which Eliot explores her own specular phenomenology of loss in a period when the very act of seeing was radically evolving.

Este artigo apresenta uma extensão do modo hegeliano de caracterizar a progressão das reflexões de essência, de que Hegel se vale na "Ciência da Lógica" para introduzir sua noção de essência, produto de uma reflexão determinante. Tal modo estendido de caracterizar a progressão das reflexões de essência possibilita tipificar a reflexão de essência constituidora da metafísica de Spinoza, bem como dar indicações iniciais para a tipificação das reflexões de essência constituidoras das metafísicas de outros filósofos. O artigo conclui com a discussão de alguns aspectos da análise Hegeliana da filosofia de Spinoza, apresentada numa "Observação" incluída na 3a. seção da "Doutrina da Essência".

Reviewed by: The Oxford Handbook of Spinoza ed. by Michael Della Rocca Michael LeBuffe Michael Della Rocca, editor. The Oxford Handbook of Spinoza. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. pp. xvi + 687. Cloth. $150.00. Della Rocca's edited volume offers notable contributions to our understanding of Spinoza and his place in the history of philosophy. It will be a valuable resource for students and scholars alike. Its twenty-seven chapters are impossible to survey in a short review. I will focus here on a few exceptional entries. Among essays that introduce students to particular topics, Yitzhak Melamed's account of the central notions of Spinoza's metaphysics and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's contribution on Spinoza's influence on literature stand out. Although there are a number of introductions to substance, attributes, and modes, Melamed has produced here a historically nuanced, philosophically sophisticated, yet still accessible essay, which should [End Page 755] be the first resource for students working to gain a better understanding of the Ethics. Goldstein's contribution is not comprehensive. A discussion of Spinoza's influence on Percy Bysshe Shelly and Mary Shelley, a source of many interesting questions, and currently a focus of an Australian Research Council project, "Spinoza and Literature for Life," would have been welcome. However, Goldstein's discussions of Melville, Eliot, and Borges are sophisticated, detailed, and admirably clear. For students interested in these authors, the essay is an excellent starting point. Two essays build upon recent books, developing strong arguments for controversial theses. Ursula Renz offers a strikingly original account of Spinoza's conception of finite minds. Frequently, the search for a principle of individuation for finite things in Spinoza focuses on body and the striving for perseverance, especially, of composite bodies like our own. Renz emphasizes, instead, the unity of finite subjects of experience, and defends consequences of this view for Spinoza's metaphysics of mind including, notably, the difference between ideas in a human mind and ideas in God's mind. Omri Boehm defends his contention that Spinoza, not Leibniz, is the target of Kant's third antinomy. His detailed critical investigation of the third antinomy in the first section of the essay (486–501) deserves careful study. Karolina Hübner, John Carriero, and Don Garrett contribute essays that significantly advance the scholarly debate about teleology in Spinoza. Hübner offers the strongest general case I have read against finding teleology in Spinoza. Spinoza's necessitarianism and his sustained attack on final causes in Ethics 1 Appendix require, Hübner argues, deflationary accounts of striving, will, desire, and value judgment, which Spinoza presents notably at Ethics 3p9s and 3p39s: effectively, we judge good just what we want or find pleasant. Such a view constrains greatly the ethics of the Ethics. This, though, is partly Hübner's point: she presents Spinoza's ethics as an account of what can be truly known about morality once we have genuine knowledge of God and nature. As an argument concerning the ordinary use of value terms (Hübner does not consider the formal definitions that open Ethics 4), the case is convincing. Carriero's clear and careful essay on perfection in Spinoza complements Hübner's more general discussion. In the tradition that Spinoza responds to, perfection invokes an end: the closer we are to the end, the more perfect we are. Carriero argues that Spinoza offers a non-teleological conception of perfection, on which activity and reality, understood in terms of efficient causation, replace traditional Aristotelian and Thomistic conceptions. Don Garrett's essay pushes readers in the other direction. Garrett points to an area outside of moral philosophy in which one might find teleology to be essential to the Ethics: it can help us to understand puzzles about Spinoza's theory of perception. For example, a long-standing puzzle, which Garrett credits to Margaret Wilson, concerns sensation. On Spinoza's theory of imagination, a given corporeal image is the product of the body and the external cause with which it interacts. So, suppose that Paul sees Peter: the image of Peter will be the product of the external cause, Peter, and the body, principally the eye and brain perhaps, of Paul. We ought...

Reviewed by: The Influence of Abraham Cohen de Herrera's Kabbalah on Spinoza's Metaphysics by Miquel Beltràn Yitzhak Y. Melamed Miquel Beltràn. The Influence of Abraham Cohen de Herrera's Kabbalah on Spinoza's Metaphysics. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Pp. vi + 449. Cloth, $218.00. Addressing the alleged "great secrets" contained in Scripture, Spinoza wrote in the Theological Political Treatise (TTP): "I have also read, and for that matter, known personally, certain Kabbalistic triflers. I've never been able to be sufficiently amazed by their madness" (TTP chapter 9, Gebhardt III/136/1–2). Were these words Spinoza's only reference to the Kabbalah, we would hardly have any reason to believe that his attitude toward the Kabbalistic literature was anything but dismissive. However, in a 1675 letter to Henry Oldenburg, Spinoza stressed that he shared the view that "all things are in God" with certain ancient traditions (traditionibus) of the Hebrews, "corrupted as they have been in many ways" (Epistle 73, Gebhardt IV/307/11). Since the very meaning of the word 'Kabbalah' in Hebrew is tradition, and since the view of the Kabbalah as a corpus of ancient wisdom that got corrupted was widespread among early modern writers, it is highly likely that Spinoza's claims in the letter to Oldenburg referred to Kabbalistic pantheism (which was the main current within Kabbalistic thought). The precise nature of Spinoza's relation to the Kabbalah has been subject to debate and speculation ever since Wachter's 1699 Spinozismus in Jüdenthumb; and the list of luminaries who took part in this debate include Leibniz, F. H. Jacobi, Salomon Maimon, Schelling, Gershom Scholem, Zev Harvey, and Moshe Idel. The main common feature that Spinoza's [End Page 544] metaphysics shares with Kabbalistic theory is the combination of pantheism and emanation. Furthermore, some Kabbalists conceived the flow of things from the Einsof (the infinite) as strictly necessary. We may also note the significant presence of Kabbalistic works in Spinoza's personal library. Miquel Beltràn's new book is an important contribution to this three-centuries-old debate. The book focuses on Spinoza's relation to the writing of the major Kabbalist of early modern Amsterdam, Abraham Cohen de Herrera (1562(?)–1635). Though Herrera's books were not in Spinoza's library, there are intriguing thematic similarities between his synthesis of Renaissance philosophy and Kabbalah on the one hand, and Spinoza's metaphysics on the other. Beltràn's book is very clear and highly erudite. It relies upon, and engages in, a critical dialogue with the recent wave of studies and translations of Herrera's books, and it is clearly the most comprehensive study of the topic. Some of Beltràn's claims are quite surprising. Thus, for example, he argues that Spinoza's 1656 excommunication was partly due to his interpretation of Herrera's works (44), and that natura naturans "does not refer to substance as substance, but rather as a free cause of that which follows from its nature" (377). The scope of Beltràn's study is quite wide, covering diverse issues such as amor Dei intellectualis, the notion of causa sui, the nature of the attributes, infinity, and acosmism. The book also contains some insightful discussions of Spinoza's reception of Maimonides and of Wachter's reading of Spinoza. Every so often, I found myself in disagreement with the author, but this is a rich, stimulating, and even exciting work, and is clearly one that should be addressed and studied by anyone with a serious interest in Spinoza's relation to the Kabbalah. Yitzhak Y. Melamed Johns Hopkins University Copyright © 2017 Journal of the History of Philosophy, Inc.

<i>Spinoza's Metaphysics: Substance and Thought</i>

This examination considers the influence of the seventeenth century Cambridge Platonist Cudworth upon the thought of the late eighteenth century German thinker Herder. It focuses upon Herder's use of Cudworth's philosophy to create a revised version of Spinoza's metaphysics. Both Cudworth and Herder were concerned with the problem of determinism. Cudworth outlined a number of difficulties relating to this problem in the thought of Spinoza and proposed amendments, particularly the introduction of the middle principle of plastik, which would mediate between the Ideas of transcendent reason and mechanical materialism. We find these amendments to Spinoza's philosophy also employed in Herder's contribution to the Pantheism Controversy, in which he too offers a revised Spinozism and introduces his own middle principle of Kraft. This demonstrates an important but under‐explored English contribution to a key development in German intellectual history. The Pantheism Controversy was an epoch‐making event, helping to bring an end to the German Enlightenment and to inaugurate the Romantic movement. Herder's version of Spinoza's thought revived the philosopher's fortunes, and Herder's notion of Kraft became central to Romantic aesthetics. Finally, Herder's use of Cudworth demonstrates the important but overlooked source of Platonic realism in German Romantic thought.

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.

Henry More and Nicolas Malebranche, each in his own way, drew a distinction between two kinds of extension, the one indivisible and the other divisible. Spinoza also drew a comparable distinction, explaining that, insofar as extended substance was conceived intellectually, it would be grasped as indivisible, whereas, when it was instead depicted in the imagination, it would be seen as divisible. But, whereas for Spinoza these were just different views on one and the same extended substance, More and Malebranche's two kinds of extension were supposed to be really distinct from one another. Consequently, neither of them could identify Spinoza's substance with both of his own non-identical kinds; and so they faced a choice over which one they would associate it with. The intriguing thing is that here they diverged. More felt that Spinoza's substance was actually divisible, and consequently material. Malebranche felt that it was actually indivisible, and consequently ideal and divine. In each case, they felt that the other kind of extension—whichever that might be—was simply absent from Spinoza's system. This article explores this divergence between More and Malebranche's interpretations of Spinoza's metaphysics, and it seeks an explanation for it in their own respective epistemologies.

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?’ 2I would like to thank John Carriero, Calvin Normore, Eliot Michaelson, Eileen Nutting, Paul Nichols, Alexi Patsaouras, Rachel Johnson and Sarah Jansen for reading and commenting on earlier versions of this paper.

abstractIn this paper, I put forward some remarks supporting a reading of Spinoza's metaphysics in terms of process ontology, that is, the notion that processes or activities, rather than things, are the most basic entities. I suggest that this reading, while not the only possible one, offers advantages over the traditional substance‐properties interpretation. While this claim may sound implausible vis‐à‐vis Spinoza's language of ‘substance’ and ‘attributes’, I show that process ontology illuminates important features of Spinoza's thought and can facilitate solutions to some interpretive problems.

Spinoza claims at E3p4 that ‘no thing can be destroyed except through an external cause’ 1. This claim is essential to Spinoza's metaphysics, psychology, ethics, and political philosophy. Despite i...