Elusive Individuals

Spinoza’s conceptualist strategy was introduced to show how one and the same individual can be structured by a diversity of attributes, causal structures, dependence relations, modal profiles, and essences. But what are these individuals like, that they can consistently support all this diversity? The answer proves increasingly elusive, as argued in chapter six. After looking at Spinoza’s limited interest in the nature of individuals, it is argued that Spinoza introduces a conceptual condition on the composition and persistence conditions for individuals. This has widespread implications for Spinoza’s account of individual finite modes, and it re-raises an old worry about whether Spinoza was an acosmicist. Even worse, Spinoza’s account of finite individuals, when combined with the results of the previous chapters, threatens to undermine the conceptualist gambit he introduced to secure them in the first place. This is diagnosed and discussed in the concluding section.