Aurora Yu

Spinoza’s philosophy presents a radical reinterpretation of miracles and laws, rejecting traditional views of miracles as breaches in the natural order. This paper argues that for Spinoza, natural law, which directly follows from God, governs the universe with necessity, while civil and physical laws are human inventions. Some events are considered miracles because they contradict the latter laws due to people’s ignorance of the true causes. By analyzing Spinoza’s typology of laws and his views on extension, I contend that physical laws depend on human imagination and thus cannot be equated with natural law. The paper examines Spinoza’s rejection of miracles as supernatural events, demonstrating how they instead reveal the limits of human understanding of natural causality. This study reconciles Spinoza’s rationalist commitments with his critique of human cognition’s capacity to represent the divine. This rethinking of laws and miracles offers new insights into Spinoza’s metaphysics and its implications for his philosophy of science and theology.

In the Republic, the city-soul analogy made by Plato paves the way for the entire dialogue. The main interlocutors use the analogy to show the nature of justice and aim to prove that just people live better and are happier than unjust people, by establishing a city to which justice, as defined by them, is applied. Scholars have recently been debating the validity of this analogy. Some critics assert that there are several significant structural inconsistencies and logical misconceptions, thus making the analogy fallacious; at the same time, there are proponents who write extensively in favor of this analogy and defend it against the objections raised. In this paper, I will re-examine passages in the Republic where the analogy first occurs, evaluate the critique made by Bernard Williams, and present arguments defending Plato’ strategy. Ultimately, I will show that Plato’ city-soul analogy is not as far-fetched as Williams argues and this analogy – as a crucial strategy of Plato’s – is efficient and powerful enough in showing the similarities between the city and the soul, for the interlocutors to justifiably and reasonably reach the conclusion that the justice of the individual is the same as that of the city.