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  • Spinoza’s Metaphysics: Substance and Thought by Yitzhak Y. Melamed
  • Christopher Martin
Yitzhak Y. Melamed. Spinoza’s Metaphysics: Substance and Thought. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. xxii + 232. Cloth, $74.00.

Whether adding considerable strength and polish to existing views, or breaking new ground, Yitzhak Melamed draws upon an exhaustive command of Spinoza’s corpus to illustrate and defend his view that Spinoza poses provocative challenges to our contemporary beliefs about the world. Thus he proves the principle that Spinoza is of more than merely historical interest.

The loosely structured Part i addresses several difficult topics with decided insight and care. First is the substance-mode relation. Edwin Curley, in part to moderate the image of Spinoza as a particularly radical thinker, has suggested that modes (particulars) are causally dependent upon but not properties of God. Though Curley’s reading has been subjected to criticisms, Melamed’s objections are unique in that they often employ texts well outside of the Ethics. Melamed’s alternative, that modes are both caused by and properties of God, while mostly in line with the views of other commentators, additionally explains how this reading, true to principle, presents a remarkable alternative amidst contemporary accounts of particulars.

Another chapter is in part devoted to a discussion of the German Idealists’ “acosmist” reading of Spinoza. Acosmism denies the reality of duration and things, taking both as human fictions. After supplementing Hegel’s acosmist reading with his own suggestive analyses of individuals and duration, Melamed presents a textually sound refutation of this view. Spinoza is no acosmist in word—though one may yet wonder about his spirit. [End Page 377]

What of the relations of causation, conception, and inherence in Spinoza? Michael Della Rocca has argued that Spinoza’s commitment to the principle of sufficient reason compels him to collapse these three concepts into one and the same relation, meaning, for example, that objects literally inhere in whatever causes or explains them. Melamed disrupts Della Rocca’s collapse argument by arguing that Spinoza understands both causation and conception to bifurcate into distinct notions. Addressing Della Rocca’s argument against such bifurcations, Melamed contends that the bifurcation of conception (conceiving a thing by its essence or its external cause) can be explained by the bifurcation of causality (immanent and transitive causation), which in turn can be explained by Spinoza’s ultimate bifurcation of existence into substance and mode. Melamed closes by suggesting that this last bifurcation is rationally legitimate. As rewarding as his critique and proposed alternative are, however, one may be disappointed that Melamed did not situate his discussion in a broader context. He only briefly mentions John Morrison’s alternative reading and nowhere discusses Sam Newlands’s also deeply thought-provoking work on conception (“Another Kind of Spinozistic Monism,” Nous 44). A full consideration of these issues is left for another day.

A chapter on the infinite modes is not particularly fruitful. However, as Melamed suggests, this may be because Spinoza himself had not yet completed his thinking on them.

Part 2 articulates and defends a masterful reading of Spinoza’s attribute of thought. Melamed defends three theses. First, the standard reading of Spinoza’s parallelism (the causal structure of modes in each attribute mirrors that of the other attributes) fails to recognize itself as an implication of two distinct parallelism doctrines—an ideas/things parallelism in EIIp7 and an importantly distinct modes-of-all-attributes parallelism in the attendant scholium. Second, Melamed suggests that we regard idea-modes as internally multi-faceted, meaning that each idea-mode contains within it an aspect for each of the mode’s other attribute-expressions. With this and the ideas-things parallelism, Melamed then presents a fascinatingly rich portrait of God’s infinite intellect. Melamed’s third thesis is that the human mind is restricted from knowing the other attributes because it is causally separated from the idea-aspects of these attributes. He closes by counterbalancing the primacy he gives to thought with an insistence that, because of the conceptual barrier between the attributes, Spinoza is no reductive idealist. Instead, Spinoza advances a unique thought-being dualism.

Spinoza’s Metaphysics will stimulate and inform...

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