Idealism in Spinoza’s Metaphysics, Epistemology, and Ethics: A Friendly and Judicious Revision to the Active/Passive Distinction as Solution to Spinoza’s Attribute and Parallelism Problems

<p>Spinoza’s doctrine of parallelism admits of certain observed inconsistencies that have long troubled Spinoza scholars. The scholarship over the last one hundred and thirty years or so has offered three dominant interpretations of Spinoza’s metaphysics as a result of the deficiencies with the doctrine of parallelism. These are 1) the subjective/objective distinction according to which the attribute of thought is understood as subjective and the attribute of extension is understood as objective, 2) materialism according to which the attribute of thought is claimed to depend on the attribute of extension, and 3) idealism according to which the attribute of extension is claimed to depend on the attribute of thought. A tension between materialism and idealism is addressed by each of these approaches. And the question of Spinozist idealism is of great concern to contemporary Spinoza scholarship. However, none of these interpretations succeed as they each fail to properly locate Spinoza’s problems with parallelism in a deeper attribute problem. Interpretations 1 and 2 fail more severely for also clashing with other central themes of Spinoza’s project such as his ethics which prioritizes thought at the expense of extension. This dissertation observes that the interpretive trends in the literature not only do not succeed but cannot succeed as Spinoza’s system admits of certain contradictions. Of primary consideration, and beyond the problems with parallelism, conflation of attribute with substance and conflation of attribute with mode. It being the case that Spinoza’s theory of attributes is deficient, I propose a revisionist approach to what I have termed Spinoza’s “deep attribute problem” according to which the attributes are disassociated from the active/passive distinction. The active/passive distinction is shown to be instrumental in tying Spinoza’s metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics together as well as being erroneously applied to the attributes. The proposed revision is that the attributes be disassociated from the active/passive distinction which is to be understood now in terms of a vertical and horizontal association. The vertical association identifies substance-mode relations and the horizontal association identifies mode-mode relations. An important consequence of this revision is that substance is recast as absolutely infinite intellectual substance. As such, Spinoza’s revised system is ontological idealism and it is suggested but left for future research that the revision may entail un understanding of Spinoza’s system too as modal existentialism and ethical mysticism.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Philosophy, PhD

Level thesis:degree_level

Open Access Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

School of Arts and Humanities

Year dc:date.available

2020

Author dc:creator

• Butler, Sean

Contributors dc:contributor

• Ingolf Dalferth
• Gideon Manning
• Steven Barbone

• Epistemology
• Ethics
• Idealism
• Metaphysics
• Spinoza
• Philosophy
• Religion

Repository record dc:identifier

https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd/613

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarship.claremont.edu:cgu_etd-1635