Table Of ContentReconceiving Spinoza
Reconceiving
Spinoza
Samuel Newlands
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3
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© Samuel Newlands 2018
Excerpt from Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer. Copyright © 2014 by VanderMeer Creative, Inc.
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For Kristina Marie
Acknowledgments
When my colleague Karl Ameriks gets a new book, he usually reads the index and
bibliography first. (Seriously.) I often jump straight to the acknowledgements, as I like
to get a sense of the author’s conversation network. I also like to be reminded of how
our little inner lives are so richly sustained by colleagues, friends, and families. I’ve
been thinking, talking, and writing about Spinoza for more than a decade now, which
means that my own debts have piled higher than I can possibly recount here in detail.
So to all those with whom I’ve chatted about Spinoza over the years, thank you for lis-
tening and responding.
Several people played a more direct role in shaping this book. I was fortunate to have
a reading group work through early drafts of several chapters. Thanks to Karl Ameriks,
Katie Finley, Tobias Flattery, John Grey, Lynn Joy, Michael Rauschenbach, Jesse
Schupack, Aaron Wells, and especially Eric Watkins for sustained feedback and
encouragement. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Jeff McDonough, who read through
the manuscript and offered enormously helpful and insightful feedback. Jeff is an ideal
reader and philosophical discussion partner, and I encourage everyone reading this to
send him your book manuscripts (unsolicited) for comment. Michael Rauschenbach
worked as my research assistant, and he was stunningly good at quickly sorting through
material, tracking down references and catching more mistakes than I thought a single
document could contain. I am also thankful to two anonymous referees for providing
both detailed and big-picture suggestions for improvements. Though I’m sure I won’t
have satisfied them fully, I am confident that the book improved greatly due to their
feedback. The remaining errors in what follows are, alas, all on me.
I was blessed with phenomenally good teachers in philosophy, two of whom I want
to mention here. My undergraduate advisor, Charles Lewis, recently retired from Wake
Forest after forty-eight years of teaching. He inspired in his students a love for higher
things, and I have still never seen his equal in a classroom setting. Michael Della Rocca
was the Platonic ideal of a graduate advisor, and his love for all things Spinoza was
infectious. Although I have followed the time-tested tradition in philosophy of
honoring my mentor by objecting repeatedly to his views, it will be obvious in what
follows how deeply indebted I am to Michael.
Early research was made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the
Humanities. I am thankful for their early support of my career and for their patience as
I brought this project to completion. I am also grateful to Peter Momtchiloff and the
philosophy team at Oxford University Press for their assistance and encouragement.
Parts of chapters three and nine appeared, respectively, in “Another Kind of Spinozistic
Monism,” Noûs (2010) and “Thinking, Conceiving, and Idealism in Spinoza,” Archiv
viii Acknowledgments
für Geschichte der Philosophie (2012). Thanks to Wiley and De Gruyter for permission
to use and expand on that material.
While working on this project, I received more unconditional love and support
from my family than I could possibly deserve. My parents and in-laws have given me
endless encouragement. My daughters, Sophia and Anna, are constant sources of
joy, pride, and much-needed perspective. Above all, I am deeply thankful to my wife,
Kristy, who listened in the dark to my doubts and fears and drew me back into the light.
It is to her that I dedicate this book.
Contents
Introduction 1
1. Spinoza Studies Today 2
2. A Quick Plunge 4
3. A Roadmap 10
1. The Desiderata of Perfection 14
1. Lust’s Challenge 14
2. Parsimony 16
3. Plenitude 18
3.1 The Nature of Attributes, Modes, and Expressing 19
3.2 Intra-Attribute Mode Plenitude 24
4. The Limits of the PSR 29
5. The Metaphysics of Perfection, Then and Now 33
2. Spinoza’s Conceptualist Strategy 42
1. Trouble in the Spinozistic Paradise 42
2. The Conceptual to the Rescue 44
3. A Pernicious Relativism? 55
3. Conceptual Dependence Monism 57
1. The Task of Metaphysics 59
2. The Case for CDM 64
2.1 Causation 65
2.2 In 70
2.3 Following-from 74
2.4 Conceptual Involvement 78
2.5 Eliminativism and the Nature of Grounding 79
2.6 Collapsing Causation and Inherence 81
3. Motivating CDM 85
4. Spinoza’s Metaphysics of Modality 90
1. Warm-up: Contingency, Necessity, and Conceptual Sensitivity 92
2. Spinoza’s Conceptualist Account of Modality 95
2.1 The Nature of God’s Necessity 96
2.2 The Nature of Modality for Modes 99
3. The Distribution of Modality 101
4. Spinoza’s Modal Pessimism 106
5. A Conceptualist Account of Essences 112
1. Essences as Explanatory Powers 113
2. Spinoza’s Either/Or 119
3. A “Hopeless” Problem and Spinoza’s Conceptualist Solution 122
