Matthew Homan

This book interrogates the ontology of mathematical entities in Spinoza as a basis for addressing a wide range of interpretive issues in Spinoza’s epistemology—from his antiskepticism and philosophy of science to the nature and scope of reason and intuitive knowledge and the intellectual love of God. Going against recent trends in Spinoza scholarship, and drawing on various sources, including Spinoza’s engagements with optical theory and physics, Matthew Homan argues for a realist interpretation of geometrical figures in Spinoza; illustrates their role in a Spinozan hypothetico-deductive scientific method; and develops Spinoza’s mathematical examples to better illuminate the three kinds of knowledge. The result is a portrait of Spinoza’s epistemology as sanguine and distinctive yet at home in the new Cartesian and Galilean scientific-philosophical paradigm.

the view of spinoza as a scion of the mathematico-mechanistic tradition of Galileo and Descartes, albeit perhaps an idiosyncratic one, has been held by many commentators and might be considered standard.1 Although the standard view has a prima facie solid basis in Spinoza's conception of the physical world as extended, law-bound, and deterministic, it has come under sustained criticism of late. Arguing that, for Spinoza, numbers and figures are mere beings of reason and mathematical conceptions of nature belong to the imagination rather than the intellect, recent commentators have cast doubt on the applicability of mathematics to natural science in Spinoza and challenged the association of him with the Galilean and...

ABSTRACTIn answering the circularity charge, Descartes consistently distinguished between truths whose demonstrations we currently perceive clearly and distinctly and truths whose demonstrations we merely remember having perceived clearly and distinctly. Descartes uses C-truths to prove God’s existence, thus validating R-truths. While avoiding one form of circularity, this introduces another circle, for Descartes believes that God’s existence validates R-truths even when itself an R-truth. I consider Newman and Nelson’s grounds enhancement strategy according to which this problem is solved when God’s existence is rendered axiomatic. I argue that since it is still possible to doubt axioms when not directly apprehending them, this strategy cannot work; having to reproduce the argument for God’s existence in face of sceptical doubt is unavoidable. Drawing both on Newman and Nelson’s notion of grounds enhancement and on repr...

Since modes of the attribute of thought are ideas of the modes of all the other attributes in Spinoza, the scope of thought appears to be equal to that of all the other attributes combined. This suggests that thought is exceptional, and threatens to upset Spinoza’s doctrine of parallelism, according to which thought is just one among an infinity of attributes each expressing the divine essence in its own unique way. After providing an overview of attempts to solve the problem of thought’s scope in the literature, I outline two reasons why the problem is not the problem it has been taken to be: (1) quantitative comparisons have no place between attributes, and (2) with knowledge of only two attributes, it is impossible to speak of norms and anomalies. I also explain how my view undercuts debate about where Spinoza lies on the idealism–dualism–materialism spectrum, and refocuses attention on the identity of the order and connection of causes regardless of the attribute under consideration.

Since modes of the attribute of thought are ideas of the modes of all the other attributes in Spinoza, the scope of thought appears to be equal to that of all the other attributes combined. This suggests that thought is exceptional, and threatens to upset Spinoza’s doctrine of parallelism, according to which thought is just one among an infinity of attributes each expressing the divine essence in its own unique way. After providing an overview of attempts to solve the problem of thought’s scope in the literature, I outline two reasons why the problem is not the problem it has been taken to be: (1) quantitative comparisons have no place between attributes, and (2) with knowledge of only two attributes, it is impossible to speak of norms and anomalies. I also explain how my view undercuts debate about where Spinoza lies on the idealism–dualism–materialism spectrum, and refocuses attention on the identity of the order and connection of causes regardless of the attribute under consideration.

Spinoza’s mind-body thesis states that the mind is the idea of the body. At the same time, Spinoza is clear in affirming that we have ideas of external bodies. There is a question, therefore, of how to reconcile two contending objects of perception: the human body qua object of the mind, on the one hand, and the myriad bodies external to ours, on the other. After evaluating various commentators’ attempts to address the issue, I make two primary claims: the object of sense perception in Spinoza is the human body only ; and the tension in Spinoza’s account of representation stems from its relationship to his doctrine of the attributes