Josefine Klingspor: "Finite Agency as Divine Agency in Spinoza"

Josefine Klingspor, Yale University: "Finite Agency as Divine Agency in Spinoza"

Abstract
How are we to think of causality in a monistic world? In particular, how do we apportion causal power between the many things existing in the world and the One thing of which the world fundamentally consists, or as Spinoza would put it, between modes and the one substance of which all of us are modes, namely God or Nature?

Spinoza has a distinctive response to this question, and it is one that evolves radically over the course of his philosophical career. Between his first and final works on metaphysics, the Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being (ca. 1660) and the Ethics (1670s), Spinoza goes from embracing a competitive model of finite and divine power to rejecting that model in place of a deeply non-competitive one: He goes from arguing that we have no power of our own because God has all power to arguing that our power just is a particular quantum of God’s power. The aim of this talk is to understand the reasons for and significance of this evolution, both for our understanding of Spinoza, and for our understanding of what causality can be in a monistic system.