God, and nothing can exist or be conceived without God” (Spinoza, Ethics (1677)
1P15)
Historically Spinoza was an early Enlightenment thinker, drawing
inspiration for both his concept of substance and his geometrical way of
presenting his thought from intensive study of Descartes’ concepts within
Descartes’ masterpiece ‘Meditations on first Philosophy’ as well as admiration
of his geometric mathematical way of thought. Tad Robinson explains Descartes
conceived of substance as a thing which is self-generated, i.e., God, although he
uses two lesser ‘created’ substances, one for mind another for the physical
world. This distinguishes the two thinkers in several ways, Descartes has a
substance dualist theory, whilst Spinoza is monist. Dualism also puts Descartes’
thought outside of closed causality while Spinoza’s theory is highly deterministic.
Descartes uses logical skepticism instead of geometry to attempt to prove his
metaphysics, while this is core to the presentation of Spinoza’s Ethics. The later
enlightenment thinker, John Locke’s, theory is further distinct from these
previous thinkers, as for Locke ideas are caused by ‘primary qualities’ which are
inseparable from the object itself, and thereby there is no primary substance in
Locke’s view.
The selected passage is Spinoza’s fifth proposition, wherein he argues that
from his definitions it can be shown that two or more substances cannot exist
with the same attributes in the same modes. This is because if they had the same
attributes and no difference in modes then they would logically be the same
substance, as there would be no essential quality that distinguishes them.
Whereas if there were only a difference in their mode, then you can set these
aside and just consider the substance itself, and logically find that both are in
fact the same substance. This second notion of setting aside mode can cause
some confusion here, as to why modes can simply be ignored. Modes can be
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