September 19

Luce deLire (JHU)

Spinoza’s Distinctions

Abstract: Spinoza scholarship is riddled with questions about distinctions. Something special seems to be going on between the attributes, between attributes and substance, between the true, the good, and the beautiful, between mind and body, between inherence, conception, and causation, between the inter-attribute parallelism and the thing-object parallelism, between infinity and indeterminacy, between the creator and her creatures, between Natura Naturata and Natura Naturans, etc.

Recent work has suggested that Spinoza might be using a particular kind of distinction in many of these instances and that the exact understanding of this kind of distinction is a (if not the) key to many of the tantalizing but obscure claims that Spinoza seems to hold.

I agree with this view. In this talk, I investigate what is going on with Spinoza's distinctions. I argue that there are actually two kinds of special distinctions: 'distinctions of reason' and 'conceptual distinctions'. Distinctions of reason are extrinsic denominations of necessary respects/aspects of a thing. Conceptual distinctions are explanatory dimensions of the thing itself. I argue for this view in close analysis of E1a6 and E4p8d as well as by historical contextualization of Spinoza's theory of distinctions, considering Suarez, Burgersdijk, Crescas, Averroes, Plotinus and (the Latin Oporinus edition of) Aristotle.

Luce deLire is a PhD Candidate at Johns Hopkins University with interests in the history of philosophy and metaphysics.

A recording of the session will be made available for some time following the event.

(The “Downloads” page is password-protected, and the password is available to all members of the Spinoza and EMP Workshop email list.)