Martin Lin

The editors of this volume, in their introduction, take Jonathan Bennett’s A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics as the exemplar for the eleven essays collected here, hailing Bennett’s book as setting “new standards for philosophical research on Spinoza”. Bennett’s work is indeed a worthy model. Aside from its more generic virtues, such as learnedness and conceptual rigor, perhaps what is most distinctive about Bennett’s treatment of Spinoza is his method, which he calls the “collegial approach.” This method proceeds by studying “the texts in the spirit of a colleague, an antagonist, a student, a teacher—aiming to learn as much philosophy as one can from studying them.” Bennett has, employing this approach, produced a large number of useful works on early modern philosophers, and his efforts concerning Spinoza are among the best of them. But does Bennett’s example provide any unity for this collection? A number of these essays, Della Rocca’s and Manning’s, for example, indeed take what could be fairly described as a collegial approach to the study of Spinoza. Still others, however, such as Kulstad’s, place more emphasis on historical scholarship than the collegial approach prescribes. This matters, however, very little. Exemplary as Bennett’s work is, the study of the history of early modern philosophy has, in recent years, benefited from the work of scholars using a wide variety of methods. I think it fair to say that the essays collected in this volume, not at all to their detriment, reflect this diversity.

Metaphysical rationalism, the doctrine which affirms the Principle of Sufficient Reason (the PSR), is out of favor today. The best argument against it is that it appears to lead to necessitarianism, the claim that all truths are necessarily true. Whatever the intuitive appeal of the PSR, the intuitive appeal of the claim that things could have been otherwise is greater. This problem did not go unnoticed by the great metaphysical rationalists Spinoza and Leibniz. Spinoza’s response was to embrace necessitarianism. Leibniz’s response was to argue that, despite appearances, rationalism does not lead to necessitarianism. This paper examines the debate between these two rationalists and concludes that Leibniz has persuasive grounds for his opinion. This has significant implications both for the plausibility of the PSR and for our understanding of modality.