PHIL 202 11 Spinoza on Substance

hello again this time we're going to be talking about a few of the key concepts in Spinoza's ethics the very difficult work that you've been wrestling with this week Spinoza was born in 1632 to a Portuguese Jewish family in Amsterdam his father ran an importing business he was raised with a traditional Jewish education groomed perhaps for becoming a rabbi however he did not complete his studies but at the age of 17 left school in order to aid with the family's importing business he did not see studying however and he continued to study with privately with a number of important scholars including some very important free thinkers who may be influenced him in his own very radical views when his father died at the age of 21 his inheritance was disputed by his sister upon which he took her to court won the case and then renounced entirely his claim in her favour giving it all to her indeed throughout his life he refused to accept honors or positions and for most of his life he relied either on sponsorship of others or eking out fairly meager living grinding lenses at the age of 23 Spinoza was excommunicated he was banished from the Jewish community of Amsterdam and once you've begun reading his radical thoughts in ethics that to come perhaps is no surprise to you Spinoza lived only to the age of 44 dying in 1677 of a lung disease probably brought on by his grinding of lenses in the glass powder that he was constantly inhaling well let's turn to the ethics now now if anything Spinoza's even more optimistic of about the possibilities for human knowledge and the things that we can understand as a result of our rational insight into the nature of things even more optimistic than Descartes and you'll see this modeled in a way in his book the ethics because the ethics is modeled after Euclid's elements the classical textbook of geometry of ancient Greece he begins with definitions axioms propositions and then proofs for various theorems so he intends that knowledge is something that can be then carried out in a mathematical form following mists one of the things that makes a perhaps a little bit of difficulty in reading apart from the sheer technicality of much of his vocabulary and his argumentation so one of the things that makes reading this a little bit difficult however it gives you a clear indication of what he thinks is possible that he thinks the human mind can accomplish to begin with let's take a look at a couple of Spinoza's initial definitions among those is this a thing is said to be finite in its own kind when it can be limited by another thing of the same nature for example a body is said to be finite because we can always conceive of another body greater than it so to a thought is limited by another thoughts but body is not limited by thought and thought is not limited by body there are different kinds but a body is limited by another body a body is something bound and finite we can think of another body larger than it one body can't occupy the same space is another body if we're thinking about one thing an opposed thought about thought of something different can chase that thought of our out of our Mines and replace it with something else this is a limitations marks it has finite look now it Spinoza's definition of substance a substance he says is that which is in itself and is conceived through itself that is that the conception of which does not require the conception of another thing from which it has to be formed substance for Spinoza is in itself and is conceived through itself this is the word we've seen before we see decart descartes using the term substance and of still using the term substance of any of them gave an actual definition to it this is the word that goes back in philosophy to Aristotle Aristotle really first introduces the notion of a substance to indicate a thing of the reality of an existing thing is what we call a substance and there are a couple of characteristics to substance which in the way that Aristotle use that which are reflected in Spinoza's definition substance is something numerically one says Aristotle and it's separable and it is independent is it separable from other things it's independent that it is it kind of exists in and of itself and it's numerically one it's one just one thing so for Aristotle a substance was just about anything at all that you would ordinarily call a thing or an object was a living thing or an inanimate some other sort of thing all of those things were substances so this individual human being this individual course of this individual dog all of those would be counted as substances in Aristotle's view indeed just about anything that you could call this this of any sort is a substance for Aristotle and Aristotle also distinguishes substances from attributes substances have attributes so if we're looking at Fido this particular dog a substance well Fido has short or long hair has cold those warm heart as a certain color many other characteristics that we could attribute to fight them and Aristotle use this particular concept to as a device for giving an explanation of unity through change these various characteristics that Fido has can change through time but phyto nevertheless remains the same individual there's something essential about Fido that remains and stays the same so notice that this is if you look back if you look back at Spinoza's definition again Spinoza says that a substance is that which is in itself and is conceived through itself the conception of which does not require the conception of another thing from which it has to be formed so we see that Spinoza's definition reflects in a way Aristotle's notion that a substance is something that is numerically one separable and individual now if we go back to our friend Fido this particular individual dog this Aristotelian example of a substance notice that we could ask well is phyto really one it's light a really numerically one Saito has four legs tail two floppy ears many hairs many of which you know are always falling out on top of it so what makes Fido indeed numerically one is fighter really separable okay well phyto can be on the sofa on the floor walk outside go different places there's a sense in which fighter is Birbal from the other things around Fido but Fido is also breathing in air and exhaling fidos eating dog biscuits digesting them and then passing them so is Fido truly separable is fighter really independent of items born lives and dies the fighter is caused by something and Fido is dependent for living on other things so it's fight ultimately truly independent from other things Spinoza takes these characteristics these qualifications for something to count as a substance very very seriously perhaps more strictly and more radically than Aristotle does and so we'll see that that's understanding that's an important element in understanding Spinoza's subsequent argument that there can really be one and only one substance in the universe that substance namely is God or in other words nature you

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Length: 10min 7sec (607 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 09 2017