Turtles all the way around

Baruch Spinoza wrote in the 17th century that reality is both divers and one. He refers to this oneness as ‘God’ and ‘substance’. In the 19th-century reception of Spinoza in Great Britain, this claim came under scrutiny and scholars argued that the theories of unity and diversity amounted to mutually conflicting elements of Spinoza’s metaphysics.    

In this dissertation, I discuss the British critics of Spinoza, Harold Joachim in particular, and explain how they objected to the internal coherence of Spinoza’s metaphysics. Joachim claims, inspired by Francis Bradley’s anti-relation argument, that no two things can be connected by means of a relation of contrast. According to Joachim, Spinoza tries to tie the myriad individuals of this world – stones, animals, people, etc. – to each other by means of contrast relations, without realizing that these relations cannot exist. I argue that Spinoza, however, that Spinoza did not use contrasting, but internal relations to harmonize the diversity of this world with its fundamental unity.

Dissertation: https://hdl.handle.net/11370/0b0e82ef-5ab6-4fa0-a915-487ee4b38151