Postscript Necessitarianism Revisited (original) (raw)

Oxford Scholarship Online, 2018

Abstract

Chapter 4 (“Spinoza’s Necessitarianism”) argues, among other things, that Spinoza is committed by at least three propositions of Ethics Part 1—namely, 1p16, 1p29, and 1p33—to the doctrine that every state of affairs holds with strict metaphysical necessity. In their densely argued and widely cited article “Necessitarianism Reconsidered” (1999), Edwin Curley and Gregory Walski raise objections to this interpretation and argue that Spinoza instead believes that there could have been (from all eternity) any one of many different possible complete systems of finite modes. This postscript develops and clarifies the interpretation defended in Chapter 4. It does so, first, by responding to the worries of Curley and Walski about the coherence of the view that the chapter attributes to Spinoza, and second, by rebutting their specific objections to the chapter’s interpretation of each of the three propositions of Ethics Part 1 at issue.

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