Date of Award
2020
Degree Type
Open Access Dissertation
Degree Name
Philosophy, PhD
Program
School of Arts and Humanities
Advisor/Supervisor/Committee Chair
Patricia Easton
Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member
Ingolf Dalferth
Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member
Gideon Manning
Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member
Steven Barbone
Terms of Use & License Information
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Rights Information
© 2020 Sean Butler
Keywords
Epistemology, Ethics, Idealism, Metaphysics, Spinoza
Subject Categories
Philosophy | Religion
Abstract
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.
ISBN
9798645445621
Recommended Citation
Butler, Sean. (2020). 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. CGU Theses & Dissertations, 613. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd/613.
