Michael Della Rocca

Can one have one's rationalism and subjectivity too? That is, can one endorse a full-blooded Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR)—the claim that everything is intelligible—and yet regard experience of the world from a finite, subjective perspective as a genuine feature of that world? Many have thought not. Viewing the world sub specie aeternitatis—as rationalism seems to require—leaves no room for the arbitrary privileging of a particular spatio-temporal location that is often the hallmark of subjectivity. When faced with this apparent dilemma between subjectivity and the PSR, Spinoza—a good rationalist—simply rejects subjectivity, or so many have thought. Such an interpretation has thrived since Hegel, according ..

Until recently, Spinoza's standing in Anglophone studies of philosophy has been relatively low and has only seemed to confirm Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi's assessment of him as "a dead dog." However, an exuberant outburst of excellent scholarship on Spinoza has of late come to dominate work on early modern philosophy. This resurgence is due in no small part to the recent revival of metaphysics in contemporary philosophy and to the increased appreciation of Spinoza's role as an unorthodox, pivotal figure - indeed, perhaps the pivotal figure - in the development of Enlightenment thinking. Spinoza's penetrating articulation of his extreme rationalism makes him a demanding philosopher who offers deep and prescient challenges to all subsequent, inevitably less radical approaches to philosophy. While the twenty-six essays in this volume - by many of the world's leading Spinoza specialists - grapple directly with Spinoza's most important arguments, these essays also seek to identify and explain Spinoza's debts to previous philosophy, his influence on later philosophers, and his significance for contemporary philosophy and for us.

I argue that the standard counterexamples to the identity of indiscernibles fail because they involve a commitment to a certain kind of primitive or brute identity that has certain very unpalatable consequences involving the possibility of objects of the same kind completely overlapping and sharing all the same proper parts. The only way to avoid these consequences is to reject brute identity and thus to accept the identity of indiscernibles. I also show how the rejection of the identity of indiscernibles derives some of its support from its affinity with a Kripkean account of trans-world identity and theories of direct reference.

in his characteristically generous and searching discussion of my book, Spinoza, Daniel Garber rightly points out that I structure my interpretation of Spinoza’s system around the principle of sufficient reason. This is the principle that, as I and others sometimes put it, each fact has an explanation and is thus not brute, or the principle that each thing has an explanation. The ‘or’ will soon be important. Indeed, it might seem that I am too focused on the PSR—certainly I seem that way to Garber1—for I seek to use the PSR to unlock any number of problems that interpreters of Spinoza have faced over the last three centuries. Garber does a great job of conveying the range of uses to which I put the PSR..