Charlie
Huenemann
Yitzhak Y.
Melamed, Spinoza's Metaphysics: Substance and Thought, Oxford University
Press, 2013, 232 pp.
In this book, Yitzhak Melamed
engages critically with recent attempts to reinterpret and refortify Spinoza's
metaphysics, and contributes his own set of distinctions and spirited defenses
to the project. He is concerned especially with presenting a new interpretation
of how the various attributes of God relate to the attribute of thought. This
leads to attributing a new flavor of dualism to Spinoza -- a dualism not of
mind and body, but of ideas and things.
Part I presents a more general
interpretation of Spinoza's monism. Melamed's principal aim here is to argue
against Edwin Curley's influential interpretation, and at the same time to
defend Spinoza from the objections raised early on by Bayle. In his 1969 book,
also entitled Spinoza's Metaphysics, Curley argued that the relation between
Spinoza's God and finite things is best understood not according to a
substance/property model, but as something akin to the relation between laws of
nature and particular facts. Melamed argues this leads to several untoward
consequences, including not being able to say Spinoza was a pantheist, not
being able to make full sense of critical concepts like immanence and
inherence, and having to say that Spinoza's God cannot really know anything. I
won't closely review these arguments or possible rejoinders to them, since this
kind of objection has been raised many times before, and Curley has been able
to supply ready defense. The matter always seems to revolve upon which set of
problems an interpreter is least unhappy to face. While Melamed argues with deliberate
care and precision in this section, it is the part that most reflects the fact
that the book grew out of a doctoral dissertation.
Toward the end of Part I, Melamed
offers several insights about the nature of Spinoza's infinite modes, entities
practically unheard of outside his metaphysics. Melamed deduces what he can
from Spinoza's scattered remarks, but is finally forced to conclude that we
simply do not have enough information to say much about them. He does however
raise a strategic question well worth pursuing: what would go wrong in
Spinoza's metaphysics if he hadn't called forth infinite modes? Melamed's
answer is that there would be a motley collection of finite modes, which did
not possess any unity or exhibit any global regularities governing changes
among them. Membership in an infinite mode constrains the behaviors and natures
of finite modes in ways that eventually account for the patterns and lawful
regularities we observe in the world.
