•  249
    Reflective Knowledge
    In Yitzhak Melamed (ed.), A Companion to Spinoza, Wiley. 2021.
    This chapter describes Spinoza's obscure “ideas of ideas” doctrine and his claim that “as soon as one knows something, one knows that one knows it, and simultaneously knows that one knows that one knows, and so on, to infinity”. Spinoza holds that the human mind is a representation of the body: the “objectum of the idea constituting the human mind” is the human body. Suppose ideas are essentially self‐reflexive, and that this reflexive awareness, the “idea of the idea,” makes the objectively‐rea…Read more
  •  512
    Spinoza’s Monism I: Ruling Out Eternal-Durational Causation
    Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 105 (2): 265-288. 2023.
    In this essay, I suggest that Spinoza acknowledges a distinction between formal reality that is infinite and timelessly eternal and formal reality that is non-infinite (i. e., finite or indefinite) and non-eternal (i. e., enduring). I also argue that if, in Spinoza’s system, only intelligible causation is genuine causation, then infinite, timelessly eternal formal reality cannot cause non-infinite, non-eternal formal reality. A denial of eternal-durational causation generates a puzzle, however: …Read more
  •  407
    Spinoza’s Monism II: A Proposal
    Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 105 (3): 444-469. 2023.
    An old question in Spinoza scholarship is how finite, non-eternal things transitively caused by other finite, non-eternal things (i. e., the entities described in propositions like E1p28) are caused by the infinite, eternal substance, given that what follows either directly or indirectly from the divine nature is infinite and eternal (E1p21–23). In “Spinoza’s Monism I,” “Spinoza’s Monism I,” in the previous issue of this journal. I pointed out that most commentators answer this question by invok…Read more
  •  332
    Spinoza and the Cunning of Imagination by Eugene Garver (review)
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 58 (3): 613-614. 2020.
    How the arguments of Spinoza's Ethics work might seem obvious. Even if Spinoza's exposition is not perfect, and some suppressed premises might have to be recovered, it seems clear enough that the demonstrations are supposed to show, in Euclidian fashion, how truths about the basic structure of nature—as well as truths about how to live—follow from axioms and uncontroversial definitions. If readers keep their imagination and emotions from sullying their reasoning, they will see the force of the d…Read more
  •  708
    Spinoza’s ‘Infinite Modes’ Reconsidered
    Journal of Modern Philosophy 1 (1): 1-29. 2019.
    My two principal aims in this essay are interconnected. One aim is to provide a new interpretation of the ‘infinite modes’ in Spinoza’s Ethics. I argue that for Spinoza, God, conceived as the one infinite and eternal substance, is not to be understood as causing two kinds of modes, some infinite and eternal and the rest finite and non-eternal. That there cannot be such a bifurcation of divine effects is what I take the ‘infinite mode’ propositions, E1p21–23, to establish; E1p21–23 show that each…Read more
  •  936
    Scientia intuitiva in the Ethics
    In The Critical Guide to Spinoza's Ethics, Cambridge University Press. pp. 169-186. 2017.
    **For my more recent views of the third kind of cognition, see my "Finding Oneself in God"** Abstract: Cognition of the third kind, or scientia intuitiva, is supposed to secure beatitudo, or virtue itself (E5p42). But what is scientia intuitiva, and how is it different from (and superior to) reason? I suggest a new answer to this old and vexing question at the core of Spinoza’s project in the Ethics. On my view, Spinoza’s scientia intuitiva resembles Descartes’s scientia more than has been appre…Read more