Nature and Necessity in Spinoza's Philosophy

Spinoza's guiding commitment to the thesis that nothing exists or occurs outside of the scope of nature and its necessary laws makes him one of the great seventeenth-century exemplars of both philosophical naturalism and explanatory rationalism. Nature and Necessity in Spinoza's Philosophy brings together for the first time eighteen of Don Garrett's articles on Spinoza's philosophy, ranging over the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, ethics, and political philosophy. Taken together, these influential articles provide a comprehensive interpretation of that philosophy, including Spinoza's theories of substance, thought and extension, causation, truth, knowledge, individuation, representation, consciousness, conatus, teleology, emotion, freedom, responsibility, virtue, contract, the state, and eternity-and the deep interrelations among them. Each article aims to resolve significant problems in the understanding of Spinoza's philosophy in such a way as to make evident both his reasons for his views and the enduring value of his ideas. At the same time, Garrett's articles elucidate the relations between his philosophy and those of predecessors and contemporaries like Aristotle, Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, and Leibniz. Lastly, the volume offers important and substantial replies to leading critics on four crucial topics: the necessary existence of God (Nature), substance monism, necessitarianism, and consciousness.

Auteur

Don Garrett is Silver Professor of Philosophy at New York University. He is the author of Hume and Cognition and Commitment in Hume's Philosophy, and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he has served as co-editor of Hume Studies and as North American editor of Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie.

Contenu

Introduction Overview 1. Spinoza's Ethics: The Metaphysics of Blessedness (2003) Section I: Necessity and God's Nature 2. Spinoza's "Ontological Argument" (1979) Postscript: Arguments for God's Existence Revisited 3. Ethics Ip5: Shared Attributes and the Basis of Spinoza's Monism (1990) Postscript: Shared Attributes and Monism Revisited 4. Spinoza's Necessitarianism (1991) Postscript: Necessitarianism Revisited Section II: Necessity, Truth, and Knowledge 5. Truth and Ideas of Imagination in the Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione (1986) 6. Truth, Method, and Correspondence in Spinoza and Leibniz (1990) 7. Spinoza's Theory of Scientia Intuitiva (2009) Section III: Nature as Necessarily Extended and Thinking 8. Descartes, Spinoza, and Locke on Extended Thinking Beings (2009) 9. The Essence of the Body and the Part of the Mind That Is Eternal (2009) 10. The Indiscernibility of Identicals and the Transitivity of Identity in Spinoza's Logic of the Attributes (2017) Section IV: Teleology and Necessarily Striving Natures 11. Spinoza's Theory of Metaphysical Individuation (1994) 12. Teleology in Spinoza and Early Modern Rationalism (1999) 13. Spinoza's Conatus Argument (2002) Section V: Naturalistic Representation and Consciousness 14. Representation and Consciousness in Spinoza's Naturalistic Theory of the Imagination (2008) Postscript: Consciousness Revisited 15. Representation, Misrepresentation, and Error in Spinoza's Philosophy of Mind (2013) Section VI: Naturalistic Ethics 16. "A Free Man Always Acts Honestly, Not Deceptively": Freedom and the Good in Spinoza's Ethics (1990) 17. Spinoza's Ethical Theory (1996) 18. "Promising" Ideas: Hobbes and Contract in Spinoza's Political Philosophy (2010)