This book offers a new narrative about Spinoza’s moral philosophy and his account of reason, passions, and social cooperation. Spinoza’s views evolved significantly over time. In his early writings, his account of ethical progress towards the Supreme Good relies mostly on the idea that the mind can build on its innate knowledge to resist the power of the passions. Although appropriate social conditions might support the individual’s pursuit of the Supreme Good, achieving it does not depend essentially on social factors. In Spinoza’s later writings, however, the emphasis shifts towards the mind’s need to rely on appropriate forms of social cooperation. Reason becomes the mental expression of the way by which the human body interacts with external causes on the basis of some degree of agreement in nature with them. The greater the agreement, the greater the power of reason to adequately understand universal features as well as more specific traits of external causes. In the case of human beings, certain kinds of social cooperation are crucial for the development of reason. This view has crucial ramifications for Spinoza’s account of how individuals can progress towards the Supreme Good, and how a political science based on his principles can contribute to this goal.

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ArgumentThis paper argues that Samuel Clarke's account of agent causation (i) provides a philosophical basis for moderate voluntarism, and (ii) both leads to and benefits from the acceptance of partial occasionalism as a model of causation for material beings. Clarke's account of agent causation entails that for an agent to be properly called an agent (i.e. causally efficacious), it is essential that the agent is free to choose whether to act or not. This freedom is compatible with the existence of conceptually necessary connections. Hence, Clarke can harmonize God's freedom of choosing with the existence of eternal and necessary relations among things. Moreover, in Clarke's account, only intelligent entities can be properly understood as efficacious causes. Beings deprived of intelligence are not agents or efficacious causes at all and their effects are thus the result of the immediate action of some intelligent being operating upon them.

The 'model approach' facilitates a quantitative-oriented study of conceptual changes in large corpora. This paper implements the 'model approach' to investigate the erosion of the traditional art-nature distinction in early modern natural philosophy. I argue that a condition for this transformation has to be located in the late scholastic conception of final causation. I design a conceptual model to capture the art-nature distinction and formulate a working hypothesis about its early modern fate. I test my hypothesis on a selected corpus of 25 works published in the Dutch academic milieu between 1607 and 1748. I analyse the corpus through a procedure based on concordancing of keywords associated with the model. I argue that the results obtained constitute a successful pilot study for the implementation of the model approach on larger scale research.