Spinoza’s Conceptualist Strategy

This chapter lays out in general terms how Spinoza uses the tools of conceptual sensitivity, variability, and identification to satisfy these competing desiderata of perfection. At its core, Spinoza’s strategy appeals to one of the most interesting features of concepts: one thing can be truly conceived in a variety of ways, even when the different ways involve distinctive content. This will be the key to Spinoza’s reconciliation project. If the world’s diversity is conceptually structured in the right ways, then Spinoza will be able to show how diversity is consistent with the various identity theses he also defends. We will then be primed to see how and why many of Spinoza’s central metaphysical views utilize this conceptualist machinery. Having focused on the more familiar cases of attribute and causal structure plenitude here, the rest of the book unpacks the consequences of Spinoza’s conceptualist gambit for his metaphysics and ethics.