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This new Cambridge Critical Guide to Spinoza’s Ethics offers an extensive, thought-provoking, and up-to-date state of the scholarly conversation that surrounds one of Spinoza’s most studied masterpieces. The first six chapters address topics mostly related to parts one and two of the Ethics. Don Garrett discusses the identity of the attributes. Warren Zev Harvey suggests that Maimonides’s critique of final causes can be considered as an important source for Spinoza’s treatment of the same topic in the appendix to part one. John Morrison argues that Spinoza’s treatment of the nature of the human mind entails a rejection of the indiscernibility of the identicals. Martin Lin contributes a new interpretation of Spinoza’s mind-body parallelism by stressing the numerical identity of mind and body. Alison Peterman focuses on the ‘physical interlude’ that follows proposition 13 of the second part and argues that instead of providing a sketch of Spinoza’s physics, the text actually entails an attribute-neutral account of individuation and identity. Yitzhak Melamed contends that the belief in free will can be rightly considered a false and yet innate idea, according to Spinoza.
A second block of four chapters focuses on topics from...