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396Acosmism or weak individuals?: Hegel, Spinoza, and the reality of the finiteJournal of the History of Philosophy 48 (1). 2009.Like many of his contemporaries, Hegel considered Spinoza a modern reviver of ancient Eleatic monism, in whose system “all determinate content is swallowed up as radically null and void”. This characterization of Spinoza as denying the reality of the world of finite things had a lasting influence on the perception of Spinoza in the two centuries that followed. In this article, I take these claims of Hegel to task and evaluate their validity. Although Hegel’s official argument for the unreality o…Read more
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36Spinoza’s Respublica divina: The Rise and Fall, Virtues and Vices of the Hebrew RepublicIn Otfried Höffe (ed.), Spinoza: Theologisch-Politischer Traktat, De Gruyter. pp. 195-210. 2014.Chapters 17 and 18 of the TTP constitute a textual unit in which Spinoza submits the case of the ancient Hebrew state to close examination. This is not the work of a historian, at least not in any sense that we, twenty-first century readers, would recognize as such. Many of Spinoza’s claims in these chapters are highly speculative, and seem to be poorly backed by historical evidence (Cf. Verbeek (2003), 126). Other claims are broad-brush, ahistorical generalizations: for example, in a marginal n…Read more
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512“Spinoza, Tschirnhaus et Leibniz: Qu’est un monde?“In and Mogens Laerke Raphaële Andrault Pierre-François Moreau (ed.), Spinoza et Leibniz, Ecole Normale Superieure Editions. pp. 85-95. 2014.
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2896The Enigma of Spinoza's Amor Dei IntellectualisIn Noa Naaman (ed.), Descartes and Spinoza on the Passions, Cambridge University Press. pp. 222-238. 2019.The notion of divine love was essential to medieval Christian conceptions of God. Jewish thinkers, though, had a much more ambivalent attitude about this issue. While Maimonides was reluctant to ascribe love, or any other affect, to God, Gersonides and Crescas celebrated God’s love. Though Spinoza is clearly sympathetic to Maimonides’ rejection of divine love as anthropomorphism, he attributes love to God nevertheless, unfolding his notion of amor Dei intellectualis at the conclusion of his E…Read more
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26Review of Michael Ayers (ed.), Rationalism, Platonism and God (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2009 (2). 2009.
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IntroductionIn Yitzhak Y. Melamed & Michael A. Rosenthal (eds.), Spinoza's 'Theological-Political Treatise': A Critical Guide, Cambridge University Press. 2010.
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539Causa sive Ratio. La Raison de la cause, de Suarez à Leibniz (review)The Leibniz Review 15 163-168. 2005.Elephants need no less than twenty-two months. But what are elephants in comparison with reason, whose incubation took more than twenty-three centuries, beginning with the dawn of western philosophy in the sixth century BCE and ending in Leibniz’s formulation of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Carraud’s fascinating book tells the story of the very last stages of this Heideggerian plot, which is also the story of the rise and fall of the efficient cause in early modern philosophy and of the r…Read more
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533The Metaphysics of Spinoza's Theological Political TreatiseIn Yitzhak Melamed (ed.), Spinoza's Theological Political Treatise: A Critical Guide, Cambridge University Press. 2010.
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534„ “What is Time?”In Aaron Garrett (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Eighteenth Century Philosophy, Routledge. pp. 232-244. 2014.Time is one of the most enigmatic notions philosophers have ever dealt with. Once subjected to close examination, almost any feature usually ascribed to time, leads to a plethora of fundamental and hard to resolve questions. Just as philosophers of the eighteenth-century attempted to take account of revolutionary developments in the physical sciences in understanding space, life, and a host of other fundamental aspects of nature (see Jones, Gaukroger, and Smith in this volume) they also engaged …Read more
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216Spinoza’s Metaphysics of Substance: The Substance‐Mode Relation as a Relation of Inherence and PredicationPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 78 (1): 17-82. 2008.In his groundbreaking work of 1969, Spinoza's Metaphysics: An Essay in Interpretation, Edwin Curley attacked the traditional understanding of the substance-mode relation in Spinoza, according to which modes inhere in substance. Curley argued that such an interpretation generates insurmountable problems, as had already been claimed by Pierre Bayle in his famous Dictionary entry on Spinoza. Instead of having modes inhere in substance Curley suggested that the modes’ dependence upon substance shoul…Read more
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640“ ’Scientia Intuitiva’: Spinoza’s Third Kind of Cognition”In Johannes Haag (ed.), Übergänge - diskursiv oder intuitiv? Essays zu Eckart Förster die 25 Jahre der Philosophie, Klostermann. pp. 99-116. 2013.I am not going to solve in this paper the plethora of problems and riddles surrounding Spinoza’s scientia intuitiva, but I do hope to break some new ground and help make this key doctrine more readily understandable. I will proceed in the following order (keep in mind the word ‘proceed’). I will first provide a close preliminary analysis of the content and development of Spinoza’s discussion of scientia intuitiva in the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect and the Ethics. In the second pa…Read more
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545Inherence, Causation, and Conceivability in SpinozaJournal of the History of Philosophy. 2012.In this paper I suggest a new interpretation of the relations of inherence, causation and conception in Spinoza. I discuss the views of Don Garrett on this issue and argue against Della Rocca's recent suggestion that a strict endorsement of the PSR leads necessarily to the identification of the relations of inherence, causation and conception. I argue that Spinoza never endorsed this identity, and that Della Rocca's suggestion could not be considered as a legitimate reconstruction or friendly am…Read more
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17Review of Eric Nelson, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2010 (9). 2010.
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341Gersonides and Spinoza on God’s Knowledge of Universals and ParticularsIn Gad Freudenthal, David Wirmer & Ofer Elior (eds.), Gersonides Through the Ages, . forthcoming.
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433Blackwell Companion to Spinoza (edited book)Blackwell. 2021.An unparalleled collection of original essays on Benedict de Spinoza's contributions to philosophy and his enduring legacy A Companion to Spinoza presents a panoramic view of contemporary Spinoza studies in Europe and across the Anglo-American world. Designed to stimulate fresh dialogue between the analytic and continental traditions in philosophy, this extraordinary volume brings together 53 original essays that explore Spinoza's contributions to Western philosophy and intellectual history. A d…Read more
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151Spinoza's 'Theological-Political Treatise': A Critical Guide (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2010.Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise was published anonymously in 1670 and immediately provoked huge debate. Its main goal was to claim that the freedom of philosophizing can be allowed in a free republic and that it cannot be abolished without also destroying the peace and piety of that republic. Spinoza criticizes the traditional claims of revelation and offers a social contract theory in which he praises democracy as the most natural form of government. This Critical Guide presents essays…Read more
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5724The Building Blocks of Spinoza’s Metaphysics: Substance, Attributes and ModesIn Michael Della Rocca (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Spinoza, Oxford University Press. pp. 84-113. 2017.
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29Cambridge Critical Guide to Spinoza’s Ethics (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2017.Spinoza's Ethics, published in 1677, is considered his greatest work and one of history's most influential philosophical treatises. This volume brings established scholars together with new voices to engage with the complex system of philosophy proposed by Spinoza in his masterpiece. Topics including identity, thought, free will, metaphysics, and reason are all addressed, as individual chapters investigate the key themes of the Ethics and combine to offer readers a fresh and thought-provoking vi…Read more
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213Review of Samuel Fleischacker, Divine Teaching and the Way of the World (Oxford University Press, 2011), Philosophical Review. Forthcoming. (review)Philosophical Review 151-154. 2016.
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278Descartes' MethodIn Lawrence Nolan (ed.), The Cambridge Descartes Lexicon, Cambridge University Press. pp. 508-513. 2016.
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230Inherence and the Immanent Cause in SpinozaThe Leibniz Review 16 43-52. 2006.The article explains the nature of the immanent cause in Spinoza. It shows that immanent causation is a distinct genus of efficient causation, i.e., an efficient cause whose effect inheres in the cause.
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1313Eternity in Early Modern PhilosophyIn Yitzhak Y. Melamed (ed.), Eternity: A History, Oxford University Press. pp. 129-167. 2016.Modernity seemed to be the autumn of eternity. The secularization of European culture provided little sustenance to the concept of eternity with its heavy theological baggage. Yet, our hero would not leave the stage without an outstanding performance of its power and temptation. Indeed, in the first three centuries of the modern period – the subject of the third chapter by Yitzhak Melamed - the concept of eternity will play a crucial role in the great philosophical systems of the period. The fir…Read more
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577The metaphysics of the Theological-Political TreatiseIn Yitzhak Y. Melamed & Michael A. Rosenthal (eds.), Spinoza's 'Theological-Political Treatise': A Critical Guide, Cambridge University Press. 2010.
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941Why Spinoza is Not an Eleatic Monist (Or Why Diversity Exists)In Philip Goff (ed.), Spinoza on Monism, Palgrave. 2011.“Why did God create the World?” is one of the traditional questions of theology. In the twentieth century this question was rephrased in a secularized manner as “Why is there something rather than nothing?” While creation - at least in its traditional, temporal, sense - has little place in Spinoza’s system, a variant of the same questions puts Spinoza’s system under significant pressure. According to Spinoza, God, or the substance, has infinitely many modes. This infinity of modes follow from…Read more
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116Spinoza on Inherence, Causation, and ConceptionJournal of the History of Philosophy 50 (3): 365-386. 2012.Spinoza’s philosophy is bold and rich in challenges to our “common-sense intuitions”, and insofar as it provides powerful arguments to motivate these challenges, I believe that we cannot ask for more. Bold and well-argued philosophy has the indispensable virtue of being able to unsettle and try us, to move us to reconsider what seems natural and obvious, and possibly even to change our most basic beliefs. Indeed, for those who seek to test – rather than confirm - their old and well-fortified int…Read more
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19th Century Philosophy |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
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