Ethics (Penguin Classics)

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For example, music is good for one who is melancholy, bad for one who is mourning, and neither good nor bad to one who is deaf” (E4pref, G II/208).

However, as Kober (2013, 58–9) notes, one of the consequences of Spinoza’s views is that important conceptual tools of ecology lose their purchase. Thus the various objects and events of the material world come into being as modes (modifications or states) of the attribute Extension; and the various minds and mental experiences come into being as modes of the attribute Thought (or Consciousness).As commonly used, especially since the time of Locke, the term substance is contrasted with its attributes or qualities as their substratum or bearer.

These two views are compatible, however, since Spinoza’s approach to developing his positive moral theory is to reduce normative claims to considerations of self-interest in a manner reminiscent of Hobbes (Curley 1988, 119–124). Spinoza rose clearly into view for anglophone metaphysicians in the late nineteenth century, during the British craze for Hegel. For example, ‘E1p25’ refers to Ethics part 1 proposition 25; ‘E1p25d’ refers to the demonstration of that proposition; ‘E1p25s’ to its scholium; and ‘E1p125c’ to its corollary.The final remedy Spinoza offers is unlike the previous two in that it is an activity that we can intentionally perform to diminish the force of our passions. But many things do have contrary moral qualities at one and the same time, with respect to different observers. But, with his usual caution, he appears to have suspected that motion may be only one of several types of physical energy.