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In P28, Spinoza shows, by referencing previous propositions, that whatever has been determined has been so determined by God, and that a finite thing couldn’t have been produced by the absolute nature of an attribute of God, nor by an attribute of God affected by a modification which is eternal and infinite. It must, he concludes, have been produced by an attribute of God affected by a modification which is…
— Sep 29, 2025 03:34PM
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Noel’s Previous Updates
Noel
is on page 160 of 186
On to Part 5. (Part 4 was entirely concerned with human experience and values, and Spinoza’s conclusions are relatively uncontroversial today… All the stuff about God in the first half seems to have been mostly scaffolding…)
— Oct 09, 2025 07:13PM
Noel
is on page 75 of 186
In 3P4, Spinoza claims that “no thing can be destroyed through an external cause” (which is “evident through itself”). He then claims, in 3P5, that “things are of a contrary nature, that is, cannot be in the same subject, insofar as one can destroy the other.” “Dem.: For if they could agree with one another, or be in the same subject at once, then there could be something in the same subject…
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— Oct 05, 2025 06:45PM
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Noel
is on page 68 of 186
Finally done with Part 2! I have neglected everything else…
— Oct 02, 2025 12:03AM
Noel
is on page 41 of 186
After reading up on it, I’ve changed my mind about whether “God insofar as he is affected by finite modifications ad infinitum” and “God insofar as he is infinite” are in conflict with each other. Spinoza seems to hold that even while substance (or God) is indivisible, substance’s modes are divisible. His demonstrations of substance’s indivisibility, in 1P12 and 1P13, don’t apply to modes since they depend on…
— Oct 01, 2025 12:58PM
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Noel
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Sep 29, 2025 03:34PM
…finite. The condition of a finite thing is a finite thing and so on regressively to infinity… But, if God, being infinite, could never cause a finite thing, and is the cause of everything, how could a finite thing have been caused at all, or exist?
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Also, Spinoza’s demonstration of God’s existence in P11 seems circular and empty. It seems to go like this:1. God is “a substance consisting of infinite attributes.”
2. It pertains to the nature of substance to exist (P7).
3. Therefore God necessarily exists.
But just because God is conceived as substance doesn’t necessarily mean that he is substance, unless Spinoza is stating a fact about God, not about how he’s conceived, in which case the conclusion is contained in of the premises. Nothing in this proposition justifies the subsumption of infinitely many attributes under one substance.
D6: By God I understand a being absolutely infinite, i.e., a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes, of which each one expresses an eternal and infinite essence.
A7: If a thing can be conceived as not existing, its essence does not involve existence.
P5: In Nature there cannot be two or more substances of the same nature or attribute.
P7: It pertains to the nature of a substance to exist.
P11:
Dem.: If you deny this, conceive, if you can, that
P14:
Dem.: Since God is an absolutely infinite being, of whom no attribute which expresses an essence of substance can be denied (by D6), and
Appendix to Part I: Spinoza takes a remarkable genealogical approach toward explaining the origin of such “prejudices” “concerning good and evil, merit and sin, praise and blame, order and confusion, beauty and ugliness, and other things of this kind”—or religion and morality in general—as arising from the “human fiction” of final causes, the illusions of free will and anthropocentrism, and related to such passions as “blind desire and insatiable greed.”
