Peterman, Alison:
Spinoza's Physics

Evanston, Illinois2012. - 208 pp. - North Western University, Diss., 2012

Literature type: Monographs
Language: English
Thematic areas: Philosophy of nature, Previous history (e.g. Descartes, Stoicism)
Subject (individuals): Descartes, René

English commentary: "My goal in this dissertation is to show that Spinoza is a more central and innovative figure in natural philosophy than has been appreciated by recent scholarship. I demonstrate that Spinoza rejects Cartesian physics in its essentials and in its details, contrary to the dominant view that Spinoza's physics is a derivative of Descartes'. In its place I develop a novel Spinozistic account of the proper conduct and content of physical science.
I begin, in the first chapter, by developing interpretations of a number of Spinoza's metaphysical doctrines, demonstrating that Spinoza has a carefully considered account of the nature and interactions of finite things that is grounded in substance monism. This furnishes resources for dealing with natural philosophical questions about the causes of motion, the grounds of inter-body causation, and the explanations of the behavior of finite things.
I go on in Chapter 2 to discuss Spinoza's philosophy of science. I argue first that Spinoza takes a dim view of both empirical and mathematical methods for investigating the physical world. According to Spinoza, all sensory or "imaginative" cognition is inadequate, and all contingent facts or generalities are classified as sensory cognition. Applied mathematics is an empirical method and so is subject to the same critique. While we have access to truths about finite things through reason, we only know about the nature of the physical through the common notions, which, I argue, are instances of the third kind of knowledge, or intuition.
Chapter 3 draws from the previous two chapters to show that Spinoza rejects the central claim of Cartesian physics: that physics should be based on three-dimensional and local motion. I argue that by "Extended thing" Spinoza does not mean a thing extended in three-dimensions, and by "motion" Spinoza does not mean local translation in space.
Finally, in Chapter 4 I discuss a common contemporary interpretation of Spinoza as a kind of explanatory physicalist. I argue that given Spinoza's account of physical science, he does not believe that we have better knowledge of the physical than the mental." (abstract)

Link to this page: http://spinoza.hab.de/detail.php?id=20041&LANG=EN