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137 having seen why both Spinoza and Wittgenstein begin their treatises from ontology, one may feel compelled to ask about the specifics of this beginning. What does ontology amount to for each author? How does each understand and use the metaphysics supporting and structuring this ontology? To answer these questions, recall how the scientific upheavals of his day determined how each man set out to accomplish his task. My discussion of this, however, was restricted and in a sense anachronistic: it highlighted only the conceptual and hence grammatical aspects of those upheavals and aimed only at displaying how awareness—sharp in the case of Wittgenstein, diffuse in the case of Spinoza—of the corresponding grammatical changes were instrumental in the way each conceived his overall project. I must now adjust the historical perspective by remarking that the relevant upheavals in both periods involved entities at least as much as they did concepts and their grammar. These upheavals were ruthlessly destroying longstanding ontological distinctions and wiping out whole categories of entities and processes while bringing forth novel categories of entities, processes, and properties of both. In Spinoza’s time, the heavenly and earthly realms, hitherto held as radically distinct, were coming to be seen as a single boundless universe that was proving amenable to full description in the “language” of geometry. Concomitantly, the state of rest ceased to be viewed as the “natural” end of motion, for uniform rectilinear movement could go on indefinitely, and the distinction between “natural” and “violent” motion started losing its grip on learned discourse. Simple mechanical causes came to replace the complex arsenal of Aristotelian causation, doing ChAPter six Metaphysics What is needed above all is an absolute skepticism toward all our inherited concepts. —Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power, §409 138 metaphysics away with teleology and inherent design,1 and instead of being viewed as composed of different proportions of the age-old four elements, things were now considered merely as extended bits of matter. Quality retreated before quantity and was left only to characterize “secondary” properties, allowing our senses to distinguish one thing from another. The whole received ontological underpinning of the world was changing drastically, with a wholly novel class of entities and processes inexorably coming to the fore. In Wittgenstein’s day, the ontological commotion was perhaps even more dramatic. A single spatiotemporal continuum came to replace separate space and time in the discourse of physics; a newly recognized finite upper limit to velocity endowed that limit with the novel ontological status of a universal constant; the equivalence of mass and energy rendered materiality itself elusive. In addition, novel kinds of entities, such as the electromagnetic field, came to acquire ontological pride of place, while not just atoms but their unperceivable constituents in all their weird properties were coming to be viewed as the building blocks of the universe . Concurrently, energy was now seen as chunky; particles and waves started appearing to be facets of the same entity, thereby blowing up the distinction between what is localized and what is indefinitely extended; and people began speaking of novel entities and properties such as quantum objects and stationary and excited states. Into the bargain, the possibility merely of measuring properties of things was seen to smack against limits strangely inherent in nature but nevertheless structuring it at a deeper ontological level. When Spinoza was writing, the ontological upheaval of his time had not yet settled down, and the ontology going with it had not become secure; novel surprises might well be in the offing. Accordingly, philosophical wisdom dictated that his philosophical theory should not take a definitive stand on what there is. To employ a mildly anachronistic formulation, his system had to consign all attendant concerns to science, leaving room for what might be coming from that direction. This system should borrow from science only the most fundamental concepts, those that were indispensable to the upheaval in question. Spinoza thus needed to limit his ontology to first principles and to what, from the science of his day, could be elevated to that rank, programmatically leaving out most ontological details. By the same token, his metaphysics had to remain minimal, even if the vocabulary he used to express it sounds rather baroque today. Spinoza starts from God and develops only what can be directly inferred from that basis in this spirit and for fundamentally this reason. Nonetheless, the major upheaval in the sciences of Wittgenstein’s day constrained his overall approach even more stringently. No...

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