“On God”: A Close Reading of Book I of Spinoza’s Ethics (Pre-Read)

At this meeting we will be reading Propositions 14 through 21. That appears to be a lot of text, but some of the propositions in this section are fairly easy to understand, even if the demonstrations and scholia are quite lengthy. We will likely be concentrating on Propositions 16 and 18.

Spinoza is widely regarded as an atheist, and yet Proposition 11 of Book 1 of the Ethics states that God necessarily exists.

Hegel’s objection to Spinoza — “In Spinoza, there is too much God” — actually understates the case: in fact, in Spinoza there is nothing but God.

The God of Spinoza, however, does not have free will (E1P32C1), He is oblivious to human notions of Good and Evil (E4P8), and His actions are directed to no end other than the creation of everything that can be conceived by an infinite intelligence (E1P16). There are close parallels to these themes in Scholastic and Rabbinical philosophical theology (namely, the doctrines of Divine Simplicity and Divine Impassibility and the Principle of Plenitude) but, as a cursory reading of the Appendix to Book I reveals, Spinoza wholeheartedly rejects the anthropomorphic God of the Abrahamic religions.

This series of meetings is organized by Robert Ireland and Patrick Kenny. At each meeting one of the members of the group will take a block of text, explain what we understand Spinoza to be saying and give our assessment of his arguments, appealing to secondary sources where necessary. We will then open the floor for discussion.

We will make recordings of our meetings available on a YouTube channel, The Spinoza Stoa (@TheSpinozaStoa). Members of the group are invited to post comments on these videos.

We will use Curley’s translation of the Ethics, a free pdf of which can be downloaded here:
https://archive.org/details/benedictus-de-spinoza-the-collected-works-of-spinoza-complete-digital-edition-by/mode/2up

We will also make use of some additional resources, such as
Michael Della Rocca’s Essay on the Principle of Sufficient Reason:
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/phimp/3521354.0010.007/--psr?view=image

and a discussion of Amy Karofsky’s book A Case for Necessitarianism:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kf0BjBBGjxA