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532Causa 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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531The 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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638“ ’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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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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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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337Gersonides 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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430Blackwell 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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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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5703The 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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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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229Inherence 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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276Descartes' MethodIn Lawrence Nolan (ed.), The Cambridge Descartes Lexicon, Cambridge University Press. pp. 508-513. 2016.
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1307Eternity 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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574The 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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933Why 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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1527Spinoza's Anti-HumanismIn Smith Justin & Fraenkel Carlos (eds.), The Rationalists, Springer/synthese. 2010.A common perception of Spinoza casts him as one of the precursors, perhaps even founders, of modern humanism and Enlightenment thought. Given that in the twentieth century, humanism was commonly associated with the ideology of secularism and the politics of liberal democracies, and that Spinoza has been taken as voicing a “message of secularity” and as having provided “the psychology and ethics of a democratic soul” and “the decisive impulse to… modern republicanism which takes it bearings by…Read more
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1443Spinoza’s Metaphysics of Thought: Parallelisms and the Multifaceted Structure of IdeasPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 86 (3): 636-683. 2012.In this paper, I suggest an outline of a new interpretation of core issues in Spinoza’s metaphysics and philosophy of mind. I argue for three major theses. (1) In the first part of the paper I show that the celebrated Spinozistic doctrine commonly termed “the doctrine of parallelism” is in fact a confusion of two separate and independent doctrines of parallelism. Hence, I argue that our current understanding of Spinoza’s metaphysics and philosophy of mind is fundamentally flawed. (2) The clari…Read more
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271Between Reinhold and Fichte: August Ludwig Hülsen’s Contribution to the Emergence of German Idealism by Ezequiel L. PosesorskiJournal of the History of Philosophy 52 (2): 382-383. 2014.
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7208“Omnis determinatio est negatio” – Determination, Negation and Self-Negation in Spinoza, Kant, and HegelIn Eckart Förster & Yitzhak Y. Melamed (eds.), Spinoza and German Idealism, Cambridge University Press. 2012.Spinoza ’s letter of June 2, 1674 to his friend Jarig Jelles addresses several distinct and important issues in Spinoza ’s philosophy. It explains briefly the core of Spinoza ’s disagreement with Hobbes’ political theory, develops his innovative understanding of numbers, and elaborates on Spinoza ’s refusal to describe God as one or single. Then, toward the end of the letter, Spinoza writes: With regard to the statement that figure is a negation and not anything positive, it is obvious that matt…Read more
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289Hegel and Marx on the Rabble and the Problem of Poverty in Modern SocietyIyyun 50 (1): 23-40. 2001.The problem of poverty and the emergence of a rabble (Pöbel) in modern society does not find any reasonable solution in Hegel's Philosophy of Right (henceforth PR). Some scholars have stressed how unusual this is for Hegel, claiming that it would have been uncharacteristic for him to leave a major, acknowledged problem of his system unsolved: "On no other occasion does Hegel leave a problem at that." The importance of this problem is not limited to the threat it poses to the sphere of ethical li…Read more
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19th Century Philosophy |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
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Metaphysics |
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