Kay Malte Bischof

I claim that a supplementary reading of Hamlet highlights and explicates as of yet unacknowledged literary aspects in the Meditations and that these literary aspects are not only particularly suitable for making this text more tangible for students taking their first philosophy class but also clarify its analytic method of presentation, which Descartes describes in his Replies to the Second Set of Objections and of which he says that it is the ‘best and truest method of instruction’. The Meditations presents its arguments in the form of a dramatic structure: the progression from radical doubt to the discovery of clear and distinct ideas and the subsequent restoration of knowledge tracks Gustav Freytag’s dramatic pyramid of exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and denouement.

This essay presents Mendelssohn's neglected vindication of theism through a refutation of Spinoza's philosophy in the Morgenstunden and highlights its relevance for discussions in contemporary philosophy of religion by (i) contextualizing Mendelssohn's argument within the reception of Spinoza's philosophy at the dawn of the 18th century, (ii) tracing the path of Mendelssohn's argument from Spinoza's philosophy to theism, (iii) and applying Mendelssohn's argument to Linda Zagzebski's account of divine omniscience showing that her account is not only incoherent but also undermines the theistic assumption that the world has an existence outside of God.

I defend Spinoza's claim that extension is an attribute that an indivisible substance, such as God, could have. However, in order to explain why, we must abandon two long held orthodoxies in Spinoza scholarship. First, Spinoza acknowledges only parts that do not depend on their whole. Second, God, considered as natura naturans, has no parts of any kind. Against these orthodoxies, I show that having parts which depend on their whole, for Spinoza, does not entail divisibility and that God, considered as natura naturans, must have such parts in order to be extended. Along the way, we will have a closer look at Spinoza’s mereology and address apparently conflicting statements that Spinoza makes about the relation of part and whole that have long vexed commentators.