RE: Defending Pantheism
May 4, 2019 at 10:52 pm
(This post was last modified: May 4, 2019 at 10:53 pm by vulcanlogician.)
(May 4, 2019 at 2:49 am)Gae Bolga Wrote: The only conundrums that spinoza could legitimately be said to have directly addressed, were those ethical and factual issues arising from the various superstitions prevalent in his own time, effectively abandoned today.
He made a pretty good case for hard determinism/lack of free will with his metaphysics, too. And this has far reaching implications in ethics, criminal justice, and a great many other things. Since reality can be described as one substance acting upon itself (according to the laws of nature governing such actions) there is no room for free will in Spinoza's metaphysics. Realizing this, he concludes that free will is illusory.
Spinoza Wrote:So experience itself, no less clearly than reason, teaches that men think they are free because they are conscious of their own actions and ignorant of the causes that make them act as they do, and that the decisions of the mind are nothing but the appetites themselves, so they vary as the disposition of the body varies.https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/...za1665.pdf
The bolded portion of the quote shows how his mind/body metaphysics relate to free will.
