Spinoza's 'Ethics': An Introduction (Cambridge Introductions to Key Philosophical Texts)
Language: English
Pages: 300
ISBN: 0521544793
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Spinoza's Ethics is one of the most remarkable, important, and difficult books in the history of philosophy: a treatise simultaneously on metaphysics, knowledge, philosophical psychology, moral philosophy, and political philosophy. It presents, in Spinoza's famous 'geometric method', his radical views on God, Nature, the human being, and happiness. In this wide-ranging 2006 introduction to the work, Steven Nadler explains the doctrines and arguments of the Ethics, and shows why Spinoza's endlessly fascinating ideas may have been so troubling to his contemporaries, as well as why they are still highly relevant today. He also examines the philosophical background to Spinoza's thought and the dialogues in which Spinoza was engaged - with his contemporaries (including Descartes and Hobbes), with ancient thinkers (especially the Stoics), and with his Jewish rationalist forebears. His book is written for the student reader but will also be of interest to specialists in early modern philosophy.
infinite intel- lect. If the essence of the body, once its durational existence is over, is simply a possible but non-existing material thing in Extension, so the eternal part of the mind just is the idea of such a non-existing material thing. Like its correlate in Extension, this aspect of the mind is eternal. It is, therefore, a part of the mind that remains after a person’s death. VP23 : The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body, but something of it remains which is
the world itself, as well as the nature of ourselves as human beings and our place as knowers and agents in that world. Thus, before it enters the terrain of moral philosophy (in Parts Four and Five), the Ethics begins with metaphysics (Part One), a philosophical anthropology and a theory of human knowledge (Part Two), and a philosophical psychology (Part Three). Part One, “On God,” argues that the universe is a single, infinite, eternal, necessarily existing substance. This is “God or
is that in the subsequent context the term is used consistently. On the other hand, a definition may purport to describe the way something really is in itself. This is the case with definitions of things, as opposed to definitions of words. Understood in this way, definitions are indeed bearers of truth value. The definition of a dog or a lion will be true just in case it accurately captures what a dog or a lion really is. While stipulative or “nominal” definitions are free and
mean that from the attribute of Extension, which expresses the nature of matter, there immediately follows a supreme principle (or perhaps a number of supreme principles) about motion in extended things. In particular, what follows from the attribute of Extension are the most universal laws governing the ways in which matter moves – possibly the first physical lemmas introduced after IIP13, or a principle regarding the conservation of motion (or the conservation of the proportion of motion
lends to the doctrine of immortality. Exactly the same extra-philosophical reasons that Descartes uses to promote his “real distinction” between mind and body – the con- tribution it makes to a traditional religious doctrine – lead Spinoza to another metaphysical point of view. 22 AT VII.153/CSM II.108–9. C H A P T E R 6 Knowledge and will 384847 Writing in November of 1665, just as he was probably nearing completion of a first draft of the Ethics, Spinoza tells Oldenburg, The human