The Spinoza and Leibniz Show, Part 1

Benny S.

This is the first in a series of posts about two Early Modern Philosophers* (EMPs) called Benedict Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz. Sometimes reading Spinoza and Leibniz, one is struck by a powerful feeling: what the hell are these guys doing? Why do I care?

They seem to take some arbitrarily defined notion of ‘substance’ and then prove from it and various other implausible assumptions that everything you think is wrong, and that the truth about the world is something somewhat bizarre.

To make it worse, they seem to make very similar implausible assumptions, and then deduce apparently opposite conclusions. WTF, mate?

Freddy L.

So in this post I want to try and put them in a context where their metaphysical craziness not only seems understandable, but moreover teaches us something actually relevant.

(this is another post liable to be mostly of interest to students of philosophy).

The broadest context for these two, and Early Modern Western Philosophy, is science. Science has appeared, along with capitalism, individualism, freedom of criticism, and philosophy is trying to come to terms with this, to express the scientific enterprise in an intellectually coherent way.

What it is like to be an Electron

In previous posts I’ve talked a lot about the way reason about consciousness, and I’ve tried to drive towards the view that seems most reasonable to me – that consciousness is the basic essence of reality. And in so doing, obviously, the fact that I’ve been deliberately a bit hand-wavy about what I mean by ‘consciousness’ has been unhelpful, since this is an area where people are likely to have little ability to imagine what sort of positive view I’m talking about. So this post aims to rectify that to some degree.

Perhaps the best way to explain what I mean by consciousness is by talking about contemporary philosophy of mind. One of the big, and long-standing, debates is over, in a sense, what to understand by ‘consciousness’.

Attributions of Consciousness, Part 3: What the Hell is Matter?

Willand Van Orman Quine once said that the basic question of metaphysics can be put in three Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: ‘What is there?’ One very popular answer is ‘matter’. I am sceptical of this answer. In this post I want to trace the history of the concept of matter, and try to show it’s shortcomings. Around the 15th and 16th centuries, there emerged a concept of matter, about which we could say the following:

1) It’s essential nature is spatial – it occupies space, excludes other things from that space, and has no other defining characteristics. All material things have the exact same essence;

2) It interacts only through direct physical contact;

3) It’s nature can be knowna priori by “intellectual perception” or “intellectual intuition”;

4) It has no trace of consciousness to it.