The Relation between Conception and Causation in Spinoza’s Metaphysics
نویسنده
چکیده
If you asked a contemporary metaphysician to list her foundational, unanalyzed notions, she might say: possibility, object and part. Or perhaps: grounding, bundle and point. If you asked Spinoza, conception and causation would be at the top of his list. He uses these notions to state many of his most important doctrines, including necessitarianism and substance monism, as well as to define several of his key terms, including ‘mode’ and ‘action’. A correct understanding of the relation between conception and causation is therefore an essential part of our understanding of Spinoza’s metaphysics. There are many different ways of understanding this relation. For example: Curley [3, p.40, 74–5] identifies conception and causation, because he thinks that they are just different ways of talking about logical dependence; Della Rocca [5, p.44] also identifies conception and causation but does not assimilate them to logical dependence; and Newlands [17, p.469] suggests that causation is reducible to conception. Underpinning all of these interpretations is what I will call the orthodox view. I wish to challenge this view. The orthodox view is grounded in the fourth axiom of part one, 1A4, of the Ethics. It reads: “Cognition of an effect depends on, and involves, cognition of its cause.”1 Given the way that Spinoza uses ‘involves’ and ‘conceived through’, this axiom uncontroversially entails:2
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