Date of Award

Fall 2022

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Philosophy

First Advisor

Della Rocca, Michael

Abstract

Spinoza believes that everything has an explanation. He also is committed to the ideal of aunified science, which joins natural and speculative philosophy. That said, no thorough account of Spinozistic explanation exists. In the first part of my dissertation, I formulate such an account. I argue that for Spinoza, a scientific explanation is a causal narrative which links explanans and explanandum according to laws of nature, involves their essences, and situates the explanandum against some contrast class. There is a major controversy in Spinoza scholarship over whether Spinoza endorsesteleological explanations, with some (such as Don Garrett, Martin Lin, and Paul Hoffman) arguing that he does, and others (such as John Carriero and Jonathan Bennett) arguing that he does not. In the second part of my dissertation I give a novel argument that Spinoza does not think teleological explanations feature in a mature science. I argue that two important current readings, on which Spinoza does use teleological explanations, are in conflict with two of Spinoza’s distinctive views – the conatus doctrine, according to which each individual thing strives to remain in existence, and Spinoza’s views on action, according to which we are active exactly when our actions follow from our essence alone. I conclude by arguing that, for Spinoza, to the extent that we view ourselves as end-governed beings, we are less able to achieve the highest form of human happiness, blessedness. In the third part of my dissertation, I engage two questions which arise from the analysisgiven in the first part. First, how, for Spinoza, do we come to know the essences of the explanans(tia) and explanandum(a)? I argue that he rejects the notion that essences are discoverable by experiment. I produce this account by a new reading of the Spinoza- Oldenburg-Boyle correspondence (which is, with some exceptions, not dealt with in detail by the extant literature), and argue that Spinoza’s epistemological views, and his views on the aim of science, militate against a science based on experiments. Second, is the use of mathematical concepts in such explanations licit? Some recentscholarship (most notably represented by Alison Peterman and Eric Schliesser) argues that, for Spinoza, the use of mathematical concepts in the study of nature produces inadequate cognition. I argue that, while ordinary mathematical concepts may be inadequate, there is room in Spinoza’s system for another kind of mathematical concept whose adequacy depends on having an entirely different causal history from the inadequate ones.

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