Article2004

Spinoza and Prime Matter

21 citations0/0 files storedJournal of the history of philosophy

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Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought Medieval Philosophy and Theology Historical Philosophy and Science

Abstract

Spinoza claims that God is extended and corporeal, but he resists identifying God with the extended, corporeal world. How then are we to understand the relation of God to the physical world? This essay first critically examines interpretations offered by Schmaltz and Woolhouse which claim that Spinoza's God is not actually extended, but a nonextended essence of extension. It is then suggested that Spinoza's God can be understood as something akin to (a modified version of) scholastic prime matter. On this view, Spinoza's God is actually extended, but cannot be identified with the corporeal world, which is changeable and variegated in a way that prime matter is not.

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1985The Philosophical Writings of Descartes 1985The collected works of Spinoza 1969Spinoza's Metaphysics 1984A Study of Spinoza's Ethics 1965Historical and Critical Dictionary: Selections 1992Descartes' Metaphysical Physics 1995Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz: The Concept of Substance in Seventeenth-Century Metaphysics.2001NEW ESSAYS ON THE RATIONALISTS

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2011Spinoza's Geometry of Power 2008Spinoza's Essentialist Model of Causation 2012The Lawn; Or on Becoming a Killer

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