Noel’s Reviews > Ethics > Status Update

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…)

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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Finally done with Part 2! I have neglected everything else…

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…