Spinoza’s Metaphysics of Modality

Chapter four argues that ignoring a fundamental explanatory question has led interpreters to misunderstand Spinoza’s views on necessity, contingency, possibility, and impossibility. Although the scope of Spinoza’s necessitarianism has also been hotly debated, a central question has gone largely unasked: just what is modality, according to Spinoza? By focusing first on his analysis of necessity, we gain insight into more familiar questions of modal distribution: what exists necessarily, contingently, and so forth. Spinoza ultimately endorses a form of what might now be called anti-essentialism, according to which the modal status of some things depends partly on how those things are conceived. Hence Spinoza affirms both the genuine contingency and strict necessity of one and the same thing’s existence, depending on how it is conceived. After considering Spinoza’s defense of this account, the author turns to why Spinoza thinks we do not, in fact, adopt necessitarian perspectives on the world.