Yitzhak Melamed (Johns Hopkins University): Spinoza's Mereology

Type: 
Lecture
Audience: 
Open to the Public
Building: 
Zrinyi u. 14
Room: 
311
Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - 5:30pm
Add to Calendar
Date: 
Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - 5:30pm to 7:30pm

 

PLEASE NOTE THAT THE LECTURE IS SCHEDULED FOR WEDNESDAY NOT TUESDAY!

Abstract:

Mereology and the concept of part has a central role in Spinoza’s metaphysics and is closely related to many of his key notions, such as substance, Extension, power, infinity, infinite modes, parallelism, adequacy and inadequacy of ideas, individuals, and singular things [res singulares]. Yet, the topic has hardly been discussed in the existing literature. Mereology became a vital field in analytic metaphysics only relatively recently (roughly over the past two decades), and this could explain part of the scholarly neglect among historians of modern metaphysics who frequently follow the trends of contemporary metaphysics. Paucity of early modern primary resources discussing mereology was never an issue; most of Spinoza’s works include detailed discussions of part and whole. In fact, one of the major obstacles in the study of Spinoza’s mereology is finding a way to ease and reconcile the tensions among various claims of Spinoza, tensions that could be due to local inconsistencies, equivocal use of ‘part [pars]’, or genuine changes in Spinoza’s understanding of parts and wholes. Spinoza developed his philosophy over a period of almost two decades, and it is clear that he kept revising his views, including, as we shall see, some of his mereological assumptions.

            In the following I will attempt to reconstruct the outline of Spinoza’s mereology. Doubtlessly, I will not be able to provide here a full and comprehensive account, but I do hope to make some significant headway toward the development of such an account. In the first part of this paper, I will begin with a preliminary exploration of Spinoza’s understanding of part and whole and attempt to explain Spinoza’s claim that certain things are indivisible. In the second part, I will study and explain Spinoza’s view on the priority of parts to their wholes, and point out the contrast between the whole-part and substance-mode relationships in Spinoza. In the third part I will investigate the termini of Spinoza’s mereology: the largest wholes and the smallest parts (if there are any). In the fourth part, I will attempt to explain and motivate Spinoza’s claim that mereology cuts across the attributes, i.e., the fact that the parallelism among the attributes preserves the same mereological relations. In order to motivate this claim we will have to clarify the relationship between mereology and causation in Spinoza, and explain his notion of “singular things.”

Yitzhak Melamed is an Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at Johns Hopkins University. He works on Early Modern Philosophy, German Idealism, Medieval Philosophy, and some issues in contemporary metaphysics (time, mereology, and identity). Recently he won the ACLS Burkhardt (2011), NEH (2010), and Humboldt (2011) fellowships for his next major book project: Spinoza and German Idealism: A Metaphysical Dialogue.