Alison Peterman

In the 17th century, Descartes and Spinoza each provided interesting and influential approaches to answering the question: what is the relationship between a mind and its body? Descartes is in large part responsible for undermining the role of the soul in answering this question, formulating the “mind-body problem” in the form that philosophers still grapple with today. Following him, in Spinoza, we find (at least) three different accounts of embodiment, whose ingenuity is attested to by their long reception in the philosophical tradition.

Original, ingenuous, and heterodox the philosopher Margaret Cavendish (1661-1717) is one of the most important writers and thinkers of the seventeenth century. Almost entirely self-taught, as well as engaging deeply with the philosophical currents of her time she wrote on a rich array of topics including gender, science and manners. Her utopian novel, The Blazing World, is one of the earliest works of science fiction. In this outstanding introduction to Cavendish's philosophy Alison Peterman explores the full span of Cavendish's work. She begins by examining Cavendish's metaphysics, in particular her view that matter is divisible, sensitive and rational and that the only kind of change is motion, contrasting Cavendish's approach with that of other 'mechanical' philosophers Descartes, Hobbes, Boyle and Gassendi. Peterman then assesses Cavendish's arguments concerning order and causation in nature, particularly her view that order can only be explained if nature is whole and that matter has 'sense' and 'reason', before turning to her theory of the human mind and perception, knowledge and scientific method. Finally, she explains and assesses Cavendish's ethics and politics, returning to her distinction between the natural and artificial and how her moral and political views are evident in her poetry, fiction, plays and other literary writings. Including a chronology, glossary of key terms, and suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter, Cavendish is an ideal starting point for anyone coming to Cavendish's philosophy for the first time. It will also be of great interest to those studying seventeenth century philosophy, metaphysics, the history and philosophy of science, and women philosophers in early modern philosophy.

As Spinoza's near‐total omission from the history of physics reflects, Spinoza never produced a physics in this narrow sense: a careful and systematic investigation of bodies, forces, and their motions of the kind found in Descartes, Regius, or Huygens. Spinoza did have things to say about extension, motion, and the causal interactions of bodies. Understanding Spinoza's physics requires reckoning with his responses to Descartes. Like Descartes, Spinoza thinks that all and only bodies share an attribute, the attribute of Extension. Spinoza's commitment to the “attribute‐neutrality” of some causal facts is reflected in his physics. Attribute‐neutrality can also make sense of some changes in the DPP. Physics investigates the nature and properties of bodies, so for Spinoza as for Descartes, it will involve an analysis of the attribute of Extension. Spinoza never drew out the detailed physical implications of his metaphysics of bodies.

The world soul was often a target of attack in early modern natural philosophy, on grounds of impiety and explanatory vacuity. But it also played an important role in debates about two of the most important questions in natural philosophy: how does nature depend on God, and what explains nature’s organization? As an answer to those questions, it lived on through the early modern period, sustained especially by philosophers who argued that individuals in nature cannot be understood in isolation from the whole. I argue that in this guise, it served as an alternative model of explanation in a context that increasingly emphasized explanation in terms of laws of nature, and that this reflects the fact that these two models represent two fundamentally competing approaches to natural philosophical explanation.

I have tried to motivate the claim that the interlude has been somewhat over-read as a “physics” and under-read as a guide to understanding Spinoza’s picture of the relationship between the mind and the body – in particular, of Spinoza’s account of how the mind represents bodies through sense perception. It does not inform us about the nature of extension or motion, and its use of those terms offers little illumination. The real argumentative and conceptual work of the interlude is attribute-neutral.

Recent exciting work on Cavendish’s natural philosophy highlights the important role of motion in her system. But what is motion, according to Cavendish? I argue that motion, for Cavendish, is what I call ‘compositional motion’: for a body to be in motion is just for it to divide from some matter and join with other matter. So when Cavendish claims to reduce all natural change to motion, she is really reducing all natural change to mereological change. Cavendish also uses ‘motion’ to name the power that matter has to set itself in compositional motion. That power is not reducible to local motion. If motion is not local motion and if motive power is not a function of actual motion, then despite her polemics, Cavendish does not reduce natural change to local motion. Instead, she offers a unique and exciting account of natural change.

The empress of Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World dismisses pure mathematicians as a waste of her time, and declares of the applied mathematicians that “there [is] neither Truth nor Justice in their Profession”. In Cavendish’s theoretical work, she defends the Empress’ judgments. In this paper, I discuss Cavendish’s arguments against pure and applied mathematics. In Sect. 3, I develop an interpretation of some relevant parts of Cavendish’s metaphysics and epistemology, focusing on her anti-abstractionism and what I call her ’assimilation’ view of knowledge. In Sects. 4 and 5, I use this to develop Cavendish’s critiques of pure and applied mathematics, respectively. These critiques center on the claims that mathematics purports to describe non-beings, that nature is infinitely and irreducibly complex, and, perhaps most originally, that mathematical thinking deforms the subject of representation, not just the object.

What passes as Spinozism in most circles can be found in the first two parts of the Ethics, and even Spinoza scholars can be guilty of making only opportunistic use of weirder works such as the Short Treatise and Cogitata Metaphysica. The goal of The Young Spinoza, Melamed explains in the introduction, is to stimulate research on Spinoza’s early works, both because of what serious consideration of those works can tell us about the Ethics and because they contain plenty of interesting philosophy.The volume opens with a story about what would have been among Spinoza’s earliest works, if it indeed existed, and closes with a nod to the future—Spinoza’s composition of the Ethics. Edwin Curley’s sparkling..

This paper argues that Spinoza does not take extension in space to be a fundamental property of physical things. This means that when Spinoza calls either substance or a mode “an Extended thing”, he does not mean that it is a thing extended in three dimensions. The argument proceeds by showing, first, that Spinoza does not associate extension in space with substance, and second, that finite bodies, or physical things, are not understood through the intellect when they are conceived as extended in space. I conclude by articulating some suggestions about where we should go from here in trying to understand Spinoza’s account of the attribute of extension and of the physical world

In this paper, I discuss Spinoza on the proper methods and content of physical science. I start by showing how Spinoza's epistemology leads him to a kind of pessimism about the prospects of empirical and mathematical methods in natural philosophy. While they are useful for life, they do not tell us about nature, as Spinoza puts it, “as it is in itself.” At the same time, Spinoza seems to allow that we have some knowledge of physical things and their behavior. So I go on to outline and critique a few of the accounts of how Spinoza thinks we can do this, focusing on the role of the common notions in physics. In the third section, I discuss the possible contents of physics, for Spinoza, and argue that they are not, as is usually thought, fundamentally Cartesian. I conclude by pointing to some promising directions for future research and suggesting a few heuristics for such research

This essay considers Spinoza’s responses to two questions: what is responsible for the variety in the physical world and by what mechanism do finite bodies causally interact? I begin by elucidating Spinoza’s solution to the problem of variety by considering his comments on Cartesian physics in an epistolary exchange with Tschirnhaus late in Spinoza’s life. I go on to reconstruct Spinoza’s unique account of causation among finite bodies by considering Leibniz’s attack on the Spinozist explanation of variety. It turns out that Spinoza’s explanations of the variety of bodies, on the one hand, and of causation among finite bodies, on the other, generate a tension in his system that can only be resolved by taking Spinoza to employ two notions of “existence.” I conclude by offering evidence that this is in fact what Spinoza does