Sep 2026· Ergo, An Open Access Journal of Philosophy· Vol 13· 0 citations
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 (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 paper 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.
This article proposes an idealist/panpsychist metaphysics which connects the integrated information theory of consciousness (IIT) with the work of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer: both frameworks describe the whole universe as consisting of different forms of auto-causation
— or, as Schopenhauer termed it, ‘the Wi...
Chris Nelson· Journal of Consciousness Stu...· 0 citations
Discussions of materialism have exploded in recent years. From the speculative realism/materialism of Quentin Meillassoux to the New Materialism of many modern Marxisms, the interest in a return to or rehabilitation of materialism is on the rise. What is not analyzed in many of these discussions, however, is a trenchan...
Contemporary analytic philosophy abounds with invocations of something called ‘the world’ (or ‘reality’); but it is none too clear what is meant by ‘the world’ in those invocations. This book shows that in case after case—ranging from the metaphysics of magnitudes, through cognitive science, epistemology, and the phi...
Many people believe that, without any God or something similarly ‘transcendent’, human life would be meaningless. I oppose this position. In its most popular form, it supposes that meaning accrues because our mundane life is merely a prelude – a time of trial, to decide the character of our life in the hereafter. Whe...
Philip Kitcher· Religious Studies: An Intern...· 0 citations
Joseph P. Fell proposes that the solution to the problem of nihilism is found in the common experience of persons and the everyday commitments that one makes to people, practices, and institutions. In his landmark 1979 book Heidegger and Sartre, and in his subsequent essays, Fell describes a quiet but radical reform in...
The philosopher John Niemeyer Findlay (1903–1987) held that the insights of mystical experience can be philosophically analyzed and articulated in rational form. Findlay provided two routes to the “mystical pole of the cosmos.” In the first, he appealed to the related notions of impersonality and impartiality to transc...
S. Drob· Religions· 0 citations
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