In Part Five of the Ethics, Spinoza claims that there is something that “pertains to the mind’s duration without relation to the body” (E5p20s), and that “the human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body, but something of it remains that is eternal [aeternum]” (E5p23). However, there seems to be nothing personal about this eternal aspect of the mind. While it might be possible to individuate one eternal mind from another – by virtue of their respective ideas and their representational contents and through each mind’s “formal essence” as the idea in Thought of a particular body in Extension – the eternal mind is not an immortal “soul” or self that, via consciousness and memory, is the postmortem continuation of the person in this lifetime. The eternity of the mind is certainly not something that encourages thinking about death and the afterlife, much less something in which one might find comfort or that should be an object of hope or fear. While some scholars do regard Spinoza as trying to accommodate a traditional doctrine of personal immortality (e.g.

The book draws to a close by assessing how far, by the end of the seventeenth century, the ‘limits of erudition’ were on the verge of being transcended. This chapter focuses in particular on the ways in which Louis Cappel and Richard Simon attempted to alter how their contemporaries construed the relationship between Scripture, scholarship, and given confessional positions. The book concludes by presenting a new interpretation of the significance of Simon’s work.

This chapter describes the process whereby modern Russian literature came into being and entered the western European cultural mainstream in the eighteenth century. The period witnessed the creation of a modern vernacular Russian literary language and saw the development of the basic features of a modern literature with its literary and institutional infrastructure. The term ‘Classicism’ came into use in the 1820s as a retroactive label that disparaged the previous century’s literature as hopelessly rule-bound and obsolete, but this hardly corresponds to its complex, dynamic, and in fact intensely creative character. The chapter surveys the period through the lens of the modern literary language, with a focus on the creation of the so-called ‘Slaveno-Russian cultural and linguistic synthesis’ of mid-century that resolved the problem of the Baroque heritage and fundamentally shaped the literary practice of the age.

The controversies that plagued the Critica sacra described in Chapter 3 took place while it was in manuscript. Chapter 4 shows what happened when it finally found its way into print, prompting considerable debate in both Catholic and Protestant Europe. In the former, it focuses on how the work was received in Rome, tracking the lengthy investigation it was subject to at the Congregation of the Index and then the Holy Office. In the latter, it charts the wide-ranging public disputes the work elicited, paying particular attention to reconstructing the scholarly views and methods that underpinned Johann Buxtorf II and Archbishop James Ussher’s engagement with Cappel’s work.

The notion of conception – the relation x is conceived through y – is a part of the undefined primitive vocabulary in terms of which Spinoza states many of his most important philosophical doctrines. Notable among these are: (1) the definitions of the basic ontological categories; (2) his account of causation; (3) the nature of the attributes; and (4) his account of mind–body identity. This entry will examine how Spinoza employs the notion of conception with respect to all of these issues.

In the Ethics, Spinoza presents a revisionary account of pride (superbia) and humility (humilitas). Unlike the traditional Christian view in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, he does not consider pride and humility as opposites, a vice and virtue respectively. On Spinoza’s view, neither pride nor humility is a virtue. Instead, they are both “passions” or passive affects, which for him are changes in the individual’s power whose “adequate” (roughly, total) cause lies not wholly in the individual itself, but partly in external things. Whereas pride is “a joy born of the fact that a man thinks more highly of himself than is just” (E3p26s), humility is “a sadness born of the fact that a man considers his own lack of power, or [sive] weakness” (E3DA26; see also E3p55s).

The laws (leges, singular: lex) of nature play a central, if not always adequately appreciated, role in Spinoza’s system (for a detailed account, see Curley forthcoming; cf. Curley 2016b, 2019). Some things are obvious enough to be undeniable: in the Preface to Part 3 of the Ethics Spinoza writes that nature has a power of acting which is everywhere and always the same, a power of acting which he identifies with the laws of nature, “according to which all things happen and change from one form to another” (ii/138). He infers that to understand the occurrence of anything that happens, we must understand the laws of nature according to which it happens. This is clear and widely recognized.

In the mid-1660s Spinoza began to compose the TTP, an ambitious work combining scriptural interpretation and political theory that would ignite a firestorm of criticism in Spinoza’s lifetime. In a 1665 letter to Henry Oldenburg, Spinoza presents the three primary reasons for writing the work: to oppose the prejudices of theologians; to rebut the charge of atheism; and, to defend the freedom of philosophizing (Ep30). The TTP was ultimately published anonymously and with a false imprint in 1670, perhaps occasioned in part by the imprisonment on charges of blasphemy and subsequent death (presumed to be due partially to the conditions of his captivity) of Spinoza’s friend Adriaan Koerbagh. Among the central claims of this multifaceted text are: Scripture is fundamentally a collection of simple moral teachings for ordinary people, rather than a source of insight into God’s nature and operations; philosophy and faith aim at different things, namely truth and obedience respectively; the sovereign maintains complete right over the external practice of religion; and that the peace and piety of a state can be preserved only if the freedom to philosophize is granted.

In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel offers the following verdict on Spinoza’s ontology: “According to Spinoza what is, is God, and God alone. Therefore, the allegations of those who accuse Spinoza of atheism are the direct opposite of the truth; with him there is too much God” (Hegel 1995, 3.281–82). It is not easy to dismiss Hegel’s grand pronouncement, since Spinoza indeed clearly affirms: “whatever is, is in God [Deo]” (E1p15). Crocodiles, porcupines (and your thoughts about crocodiles and porcupines) are all in God. There is nothing that is not in Spinoza’s God.

The polymath Goethe was such an important literary and cultural figure in Germany that his era is sometimes referred to as the Goethezeit. However, it is notoriously difficult to assess Goethe’s achievements as a scientist and philosopher, given his syncretic, and sometimes mystical approach. Spinoza, the philosopher Goethe esteemed above all others, was among his key influences.

In E3def3, Spinoza defines the term “affect” (affectus), claiming, “By affect I understand affections of the body in which the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time, the ideas of these affections.” Affects are affections of the body by which or in which (the Latin, quibus, is ambiguous) the body’s power changes. The first notable feature of the affects is an event in the body that alters its power of acting, increasing or decreasing it. This state of the body, and the idea of this state, is an affect.

Spinoza does not talk about “the Absolute” in the nominative sense that the German Idealists will use later, but he consistently uses the adjective (absoluta/e) and adverb throughout his works. For Spinoza, something is “absolute” in a metaphysical sense when it is considered without relation to anything else.

Piety (pietas) is an important concept in Spinoza’s ethics, where it describes aspects of virtuous individuals, and in his political writing, where he uses it to develop his theological views. Since Spinoza’s understanding of the term is informed by its received meaning, it is important first to mention how the term was understood in his immediate context, the seventeenth-century Dutch intellectual scene. The term would have been known foremost from the humanistic tradition, which focused on ancient Roman writers like Cicero and Tacitus, rather than from the scholastic tradition. In the classical Latin used by Roman writers, pietas refers to upright conduct, particularly dutiful conduct, but also kindness and loyalty. The term is ambiguous between upright conduct that is religious or moral in nature. In the Christian era, pietas came to refer more exclusively to the religious virtue of dutiful reverence for God. Pietas was also an important concept in Calvinist theology, the orthodox theology of the Dutch Republic.

This chapter traces the development of Russian poetry from the earliest known texts to the late nineteenth century. The emphasis is on versification (syllabic, syllabo-tonic, and tonic [also called accentual] systems, all of which appear at times in Russia), genre, and style. Examples come primarily from the work of canonic poets. A distinction is drawn between folkloric and literary verse, which intersected only infrequently. Some attention is devoted to the ways that Russian poetry was indebted to Polish, German, and French models. The focus is on two periods: the eighteenth century, when secular Russian literature first began to flourish, and the ‘Golden Age’ of Aleksandr Pushkin.

Spinoza inherits the notion of substance (substantia) from Descartes and the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition. To appreciate what Spinoza is doing with the category of substance, and how his monism – that is, his thesis that there is no substance besides God – works, it is useful to begin with a basic understanding of the Aristotelian distinction between a substance and an accident.