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461Consciousness in Spinoza's Philosophy of MindSouthern Journal of Philosophy 45 (2): 269-287. 2010.Spinoza's philosophy of mind is thought to lack a serious account of consciousness. In this essay I argue that Spinoza's doctrine of ideas of ideas has been wrongly construed, and that once righted it provides the foundation for an account. I then draw out the finer details of Spinoza's account of consciousness, doing my best to defend its plausibility along the way. My view is in response to a proposal by Edwin Curley and the serious objection leveled against it by Margaret Wilson and Jonathan …Read more
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10Spinoza's argument for substance monism: why there is only one thingLexington Books. 2023.Spinoza's Argument for Substance Monism: Why There Is Only One Thing interprets and defends Spinoza's God/Nature argument using speculative metaphysics as a method and illustrates the practice and potential of metaphysics at work. These features work together to strengthen Spinoza's argument that only one substantial being exists.
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31The Substantial Essence in Spinoza's Ontological ArgumentJournal of the History of Philosophy 58 (4): 705-726. 2020.descartes appears to intentionally distance his a priori argument for God from the conceptual orientation of earlier arguments by insisting that God's true and immutable nature is something that is real whether he conceives it or not. I find within me countless ideas of things which even though they may not exist anywhere outside me still cannot be called nothing; for although in a sense they can be thought of at will, they are not my invention but have their own true and immutable natures.1 Des…Read more
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"Spinoza's Contributions to Descartes' Ontological Argument"Faith and Philosophy. forthcoming.Spinoza revises his early Cartesian arguments for God in three important respects. By defining God in terms of conceptually distinct attributes, he has an argument for God’s actual possibility. By defining God in terms of conceptual independence, he has an argument for the mind independence of God’s nature. By including reason and power as features of God’s nature, he provides a mechanism by which God’s nature necessitates God. Each of these address important objections to Descartes’ ontological…Read more
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2195Immanence and Causation in SpinozaIn Andre Santos Campos (ed.), Spinoza: Basic Concepts, Imprint Academic. pp. 14-24. 2015.I defend an expanded reading of immanent causation that includes both inherence and causal efficacy; I argue that the latter is required if God is to remain the immanent cause of finite modes.
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9Aristotle, Spinoza, and Burnside on Infinite SpaceSouthwest Philosophy Review 39 (2): 23-26. 2023.Aristotle argues that the world is populated by real and distinct physical substances; Spinoza that there must and can only be one physical substance. Aristotle’s view carries considerably intuitive appeal, but Spinoza’s logic can, under the right interpretation, seem awfully convincing. Andrew Burnside (2023) helps us to explore what occurs when Aristotle’s unstoppable intuitive appeal meets Spinoza’s impeccable logic. Burnside’s project, as I understand it, has two aims: to show that Spinoza’s…Read more
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57Spinoza's Formal MechanismPacific Philosophical Quarterly 99 (S1): 151-181. 2017.I defend a new reading of Spinoza's account of causation that reconciles the strengths of the mechanist and formal cause interpretations by locating instances of nature's fixed and unchanging laws inside individual natures; natures are efficacious because that's where the laws are. God's necessity, for instance, follows from certain logical principles contained within God's nature. Causes between finite particulars likewise stem entirely from finite natures. They do so, I argue, because finite i…Read more
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The Public Discourse of the Unlimited Communication Community: Joining in on a “Rescuing Critique” of R.S. Peters’s Ethics and EducationPhilosophy of Education 64 181-189. 2008.
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27Matching Well-Being to Merit: The Example of PunishmentEthical Perspectives 18 (1): 5-27. 2011.In this paper, I explore our common-sense thinking about the relation between moral value, moral merit, and well-being. Starting from Ross’s observation that welfarist axiologies ignore our intuitions about desert, I focus on axiologies that take moral merit and well-being to be independent determinants of value. I distinguish three ways in which these axiologies can be formulated, and I then consider their application to the issue of punishment. The objection that they recommend penalties in ci…Read more
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30The Problem of Universals in Early Modern Philosophy ed. by Stefano Di Bella and Tad M. SchmaltzJournal of the History of Philosophy 56 (4): 754-755. 2018.Di Bella and Schmaltz write in their introduction that the early modern problem of universals originates largely in a turn away from ancient and late-medieval problems. The modern problem, they suggest, investigates universals by asking what it means to include them as contents of our thoughts. The collection of essays that follows demonstrates persuasively, however, that we should resist the impulse, no matter how heuristic, to regard each era as having its own—much less a single—problem of uni…Read more
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98The Framework of Essences in Spinoza's EthicsBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 16 (3). 2008.(2008). The Framework of Essences in Spinoza's Ethics. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 16, No. 3, pp. 489-509. doi: 10.1080/09608780802200489
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4A New Challenge to the Necessitarian Reading of SpinozaIn Daniel Garber & Steven Nadler (eds.), Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy Volume V, Oxford University Press. 2010.
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19Spinoza’s Metaphysics: Substance and Thought by Yitzhak Y. Melamed (review)Journal of the History of Philosophy 52 (2): 377-378. 2014.I review Spinoza's Metaphysics: Substance and Thought by Yitzhak Melamed
Areas of Specialization
17th/18th Century Philosophy |