Sarah Tropper

According to a recent interpretation by Samuel Newlands, not only Leibniz, but already Spinoza embraced a version of the Principle of Plenitude (POP), which posits that the maximal number of (com)possible entities exists. On this interpretation, Spinoza’s endorsement of POP is in tension with another important feature of his account, namely, his commitment to the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR). Whereas POP embraces plenitude, PSR opts for sparsity. This chapter takes this characterization, with which the authors largely agree, as background to a discussion of Leibniz’s rehabilitation of divine will in his early philosophy. In the authors’ view, while Leibniz agrees with Spinoza that both POP and PSR obtain, he thinks that a commitment to the former is not well-grounded if there is no distinction between intellect and will in God. This is, the authors claim, part of the reason why he restored divine will, even though he ultimately subordinates it to divine intellect.

This chapter addresses the question of a shared human nature in Spinoza’s writings by investigating the role of ‘form’. It claims that this notion functions in a similar way to substantial forms, insofar as it is related to preservation of life, specificity of affects, and individual perfection. However, its role in the Ethics, it is further argued, is not one of explication, but rather one of limitation. ‘Form’ is introduced to capture the impossibility of transformation and to set boundaries akin to species notions. Therefore, ‘form’ provides Spinoza with the resources to maintain metaphysical gradualism while restricting changes in kind and to specify a standard that accounts for his claims of agreement between human individuals and differing perfections. Thus, ‘form’ captures fundamental aspects of human life: the distinction between humans and other kinds of individuals, the specificity of human experience, and the greater perfection of one human being compared to another.

This volume gathers various contributions on the role of the human perspective and the human lifeform in Spinoza’s philosophy as well as on the resources that Spinoza provides for such a philosophy. Its aim is to draw attention to those parts of Spinoza’s philosophy where he is explicitly engaged in a reflection on human life or some peculiarity of it, and the texts collected here argue in various ways that notions such as ‘human being’, ‘human life’, and related notions play an important role in his thought in non-trivial ways. These hitherto neglected perspectives on Spinoza’s philosophy result in accounts of a Spinozistic universe that is no longer completely devoid of particulars and of all those features of reality that are usually taken to be fundamental to the human condition and experience, such as subjectivity or perspectivity, temporality, and emotional salience.

This volume gathers various contributions on the role of the human perspective and the human lifeform in Spinoza’s philosophy as well as on the resources that Spinoza provides for such a philosophy. While significant parts of the current scholarship tend towards ascribing an acosmist view, more recent interpretations have begun to consider human life and specifically human attitudes as being of fundamental concern to Spinoza. The aim of this book to draw attention to those parts of Spinoza’s philosophy where he is explicitly engaged in a reflection on human life or some peculiarity of it, and the texts collected here argue in various ways that notions such as ‘human being’, ‘human life’, and related notions play an important role in his thought and that they do so in non-trivial ways. These hitherto neglected perspectives on Spinoza’s philosophy result in accounts of a Spinozistic universe that is no longer completely devoid of particulars and of all those features of reality that are usually taken to be fundamental to the human condition and experience, such as subjectivity or perspectivity, temporality, and emotional salience. In doing so, this book provides new avenues for the study of Spinoza’s philosophy by highlighting the role of the human perspective for his metaphysics, ethics, philosophy of mind, epistemology, and social as well as political philosophy. Thus, the volume contains highly original contributions from leading scholars that is going to have an impact on the full breath of Spinoza studies.

The aim of this paper is to show how the understanding of Leibniz’s notion of toleration in matters of faith should be considered not merely as a pragmatic, but also as an epistemologically and metaphysically relevant concept. Following Maria Rosa Antognazza’s account, I will argue that Leibniz’s view on the belief of mysteries is ‘above reason’ and the relation between faith and experience plays an important role in his discussion of transubstantiation with Des Bosses, but also that Leibniz allows for presumptions based on faith to enter metaphysical discussions. Doing so, despite the fact that we cannot achieve certainty in these matters and have to accept a variety of different beliefs regarding the same objects, enriches our understanding of the world and of God—and also gives us reason to take seriously Leibniz’s engagement with corporeal substances, albeit only as presumptions rather than as necessary consequences of his basic metaphysical system. Finally, I will illustrate this point by showing how it is also in play in Leibniz’s response to Tournemine regarding the mind-body-union.

This volume unites Peter Winch's previously unpublished work on Baruch de Spinoza. The primary source for the text is a series of seminars on Spinoza that Winch gave, first at the University of Swansea in 1982 and then at King's College London in 1989. What emerges is an original interpretation of Spinoza's work that demonstrates his continued relevance to contemporary issues in metaphysics, epistemology and ethics, and establishes connections to other philosophers - not only Spinoza's predecessors such as René Descartes, but also important 20th Century philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Simone Weil. Alongside Winch's lectures, the volume contains an interpretive essay by David Cockburn, and an introduction by the editors.

It is obvious that both Spinoza and Leibniz attach importance to the notion of expression in their philosophical writings and that both do so in a similar fashion: They agree, for example, that the mind expresses the body (although this claim has rather different meanings for each of them). Another – albeit related – use of ‘expression’ that appears in both thinkers provides a deeper insight into some metaphysical similarity as well as difference: The idea that expression is closely connected with the perfection and action of individual things. While this relation is explicit in Leibniz, I will show that it is also in a less straightforward way found in Spinoza and, furthermore, that the relation of expression in regards to perfection is similar in Spinoza and Leibniz as both of them regard individuals as perfect insofar as they express the world and God. But one crucial difference in their accounts lies in the claim that, for Spinoza, what is being expressed and gives rise to perfection can be privative in nature, while such a thing cannot be the object of an expression for Leibniz. As I will argue, this not based merely on their different metaphysical views, but also on a difference in what can serve as content of an expression.

Throughout his philosophical career, Peter Winch had a particular interest in the philosophy of Spinoza, as is evidenced not only by a variety of references on a diverse range of issues in his works, but also by several lectures and seminars he delivered on this thinker. A reconstruction of his interpretation of Spinoza’s system, which unites epistemological, metaphysical and ethical considerations as mutually dependent, brings to the fore Winch’s interest in the individual not only as an important epistemological, but equally as a moral agent, who is embedded in a web of circumstances that shape her view on the world and the possibilities and options she is able to entertain. Moreover, in his reading of Spinoza, the focus on the irreducibility of the individual’s standpoint is also connected to the philosophies of Wittgenstein and Simone Weil, a connection which adds at the same time an emphasis on a fundamental limitation of moral philosophy in general.

This chapter discusses the development of philosophical discussions of suicide between the Middle Ages and David Hume’s ‘On Suicide’. In tracing the development of several arguments for and against suicide, it shows that the medieval phase of blanket prohibition met some resistance in Renaissance fictional accounts or renditions of Roman sources, but that early modern philosophers neither absorbed nor countered those arguments. Rather, they returned to a prohibitionist stance with arguments based on assertions about natural rights and duties or the overall goodness of God’s creation. The essay shows that Hume’s argumentation for the permissibility of suicide is an attack on the metaphysical assumptions that led his immediate predecessors to proclaim its impermissibility, rather than a response to traditional medieval arguments.