BOSTON UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

Dissertation

SPINOZA'S ACCOUNT OF COMPOSITION

by

JOHN R. T. GREY B.A., University of Minnesota, 2006

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
2012

UMI Number: 3520208

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 Copyright by JOHN R. T. GREY

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First Reader Aaron Garrett, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Philosophy Boston University

Second Reader David Licbesinan. Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Pliilosopliy Boston University

Third Reader Michael Delia Rocea, Ph.D. Professor of Philosophy Yale University

DEDICATION to Sarah Grey, sine qua non

iv

Acknowledgments
While composing this dissertation, I received a great deal of guidance from my committee, without which the work would be much impoverished. Aaron Garrett introduced me to Spinoza during my first year of graduate school. His passionate discussions of the Early Moderns initiated my interest in the history of philosophy, and I greatly appreciated his continued support and feedback while writing this workin spite of his claim to be a "lapsed Spinozist." Dave Liebesman provided extensive suggestions for each chapter, leading in most cases to serious revision and (I think) a philosophically stronger view overall. Michael Delia Rocca likewise gave me numerous suggestions for each chapter, along with far more of his time than I had any right to ask. Perhaps it goes without saying that his challenging but invigorating work on Spinoza is the central reason that I chose to research this topic; I'll say it anyway. A number of friends and colleagues gave me feedback on various sections. Thanks to Alex Silverman, Amelie Rorty, and the proseminar gang, who offered very helpful criticism on what are now Chapters 2 and 3. I want to thank my wife, Sarah Grey, to whom this dissertation is dedicated. She has been patient, kind, and supportive throughout the entire process of writing and revising the work. Finally, I want to thank my family, especially Kathryn, Sam, and Hugh Tietze. My father, Thomas Tietze, passed away while I was writing the first draft of this dissertation, and without my family's encouragement it is probable that I never would have completed it.

SPINOZA'S ACCOUNT OF COMPOSITION

(Order No. )

JOHN R. T. GREY Boston University, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 2012 Major Advisor: Aaron Garrett, Associate Professor of Philosophy

ABSTRACT

The aim of the dissertation is to develop and defend a new interpretation of Spinoza's metaphysics of individuals, focusing on his account of the conditions under which several things compose one. Spinoza's discussion of composition in the Ethics focuses on complex bodies, so Chapter 1 provides an interpretation of Spinoza's physics in order to lay the groundwork for interpreting his metaphysics. Although it may appear that Spinoza's physics is of the same stripe as the mechanical physical theories endorsed by Hobbes and Descartes, his claims about the power of finite bodies suggest that his physical theory is dynamic rather than mechanistic. Using that discussion of the physics of complex individuals as background, Chapter 2 presents an argument that Spinoza reduces composition to a certain causal relation among an individual's parts (their "pattern" [ratio] of causal relations), and that particular individuals are tokens of this causal relation. This conception of the part-whole relation explains Spinoza's account of persistence while preserving the intuition that wholes depend upon their parts. To clarify the central thesis of Spinoza's account, Chapter 3 fleshes out the notion of a pattern of causal relations. The pattern of causal relations among an individual's parts is what generates and explains that individual's causal powers. Having established the central claims of Spinoza's account of composition, Chap-

ter 4 contains a series of arguments intended to motivate that account.

There

are several plausible metaphysical principles that most rival contemporary accounts of compositionuniversalism, nihilism, organicism, and several othersfail to satisfy. Spinoza's account does satisfy those principles; other things being equal, then, Spinoza's account is preferable to these contemporary alternatives. Finally, Chapter 5 considers a possible reply to the strongest principled argument against Spinoza's view, the argument from vagueness. Although the notion of a "pattern" of causal relations seems vague, Spinoza can appeal to the causal powers generated by such patterns in order to provide a principled cutoff between patterns and non-patterns. Spinoza's metaphysics of composition, then, is as good as, or better than, the views championed by contemporary metaphysicians. Although Spinoza's view has been largely ignored, it remains viable even today.

vii

Contents

Contents Introduction 1 Spinoza's Physics of Individuals 1.1 The purported mechanical influence 1.1.1 1.1.2 1.1.3 Hobbes' physics Descartes' physics The Alternative

viii 1 9 11 13 18 27 29 32 44 56 57 58 65 72 76 87 88 107 Ill

2 Spinoza's Account of Composition 2.1 Spinoza on Composition 2.2 Consequences &; Further Questions 3 Patterns and Powers 3.1 A Powers-Based Account of Patterns of Causal Relations 3.1.1 3.1.2 The Case for Necessity The Case for Sufficiency

3.2 The Composition of the Mind 3.3 Conatus and the Power of a Composite

4 Defending the Account 4.1 What Composition Could Not Be 4.2 What Composition Is

4.3 In Defense of Spinoza's Account of Composition

5 Spinoza on Vagueness and Degrees of Composition 5.1 The Argument from Vagueness 5.2 Composition by Degrees Conclusion Bibliography

128 129 144 156 164

ix

Introduction
This dissertation provides a detailed examination and philosophical defense of Spinoza's metaphysics of compositionof when and why several things compose one whole. Although the topic appears obscure, it has subtle connections with many and varied parts of his philosophical system. The reason for this is that Spinoza's Ethics is, at the end of the day, a treatise about how human beings ought to live. For a rationalist like Spinoza, the first question that must be answered before we can determine how human beings ought to live is, what is a human being? And one of Spinoza's answers to that question is that a human being is a highly composite individual If we want to understand Spinoza's work, then, we will want to understand his account of composition. Spinoza's account of composition can be summarized very briefly indeed: several individuals compose a single complex whole if and only if those individuals instantiate a pattern of causal relations. The precise meaning of "a pattern of causal relations" has of course to be filled out, but already some interesting consequences of the account can be observed. It is not necessarily the case that given several individuals, they compose a single complex individual. Nor is it the case that the only complex individuals are living organisms. Nor is it the case that whether several individuals compose a complex whole is merely a linguistic matter, or a question of how we (arbitrarily) restrict (or relax) our quantifiers.1 Composition, on Spinoza's view, reduces to certain structures of efficient causation. As I will argue, Spinoza's way of reducing composition to causal relations is highly
1 At least not on the assumption that causal relations are not figments of language. I mention these examples because they distinguish Spinoza's account from its leading competitors.

original, and it does not deserve to be ignored by contemporary philosophers. Before making my case, however, it will be useful for me to make clear the way in which accounts of composition, individuation, and persistence are logically connected (or unconnected, as the case may be). Many commentators have considered Spinoza's accounts of individuation and persistence, and it may not at first be clear what more could be added to these discussions. However, though his approaches to these three problems are related, they are in fact logically distinct. The merits and flaws of Spinoza's approach to any one of these problems need not extend to the others. An account of individuation cannot rely upon an account of composition or of persistence. In order to explain the composition or persistence of a given individual, we must already be able to distinguish that individual from all others. By contrast, an account of persistence depends upon our having already provided an account of both individuation (so we can pick out the individuals whose persistence is to be accounted for) and of composition (so we know the nature of the complex individuals that are to be accounted for). However, the way in which we account for individuation and composition does not determine the way in which we must account for persistence. Neither does the way in which we account for persistence determine the way in which we must account for individuation or composition.2 Therefore in developing an account of composition, we are in the following logical position. We must assume that we have some way of individuating one thing from another. But what answer we give to the problem of individuation will not impact our account of composition, so long as there is an answer, and that answer tracks our intuitions, at least roughly. (The point about tracking our intuitions is more important than it might seem. If Spinoza were to say that there is no correct metaphysical
the intuitions that lead you to endorse a certain account of persistence will almost certainly lead you to endorse certain accounts of individuation and composition. But no interesting logical entailment relations hold among the three sorts of account.
2 Admittedly,

principle of individuation, and hence no correct way of divvying up the world into distinct individuals, it would be a waste of time to inquire into the metaphysics of complex individuals. Fortunately, Spinoza does not say this.) Further, we may wholly ignore the problem of persistence, for whether several individuals compose a complex whole is logically independent of whether that complex whole, if it exists, persists through any particular change. Although Spinoza appears to run.these three problems together, then, we can consider his solution to any one of them as distinct from his solutions to the others. I will at various points consider some of the secondary literature on Spinoza's accounts of individuation and persistence, but by and large this commentary will not be useful to understanding his account of composition. Far more useful, and more frequently discussed, will be the secondary literature on Spinoza's conceptions of causal power, existence, and essence. Spinoza's views here lead to several important theses that shape his account of composition. That having been said, the argument of this dissertation will proceed in the following way. In Chapter 1, I outline the general picture of Spinoza's philosophy that I take as background for the project. Spinoza's physics in particular is of central importance to my project, for it is one of the few places where he expresses his views about composition. The key properties and relations governing his notion of a composite individual are physical; he appeals to undefined conceptions of motion, rest, and the communication of motions. What does Spinoza have in mind when he uses these terms? Contrary to much of the scholarly literature on this topic, I argue that Spinoza does not simply take up Descartes' (or Hobbes') versions of these notions. By the time Spinoza was writing the Ethics, he had already expressed in his correspondence grave doubts about the standard mechanistic theories of physics. Instead, I argue, Spinoza's physics should be seen as a kind of schematic intended

to solve the problems of material composition and persistence regardless of potential new developments in physics. In Chapter 2, I hone in on the relation that I think is doing the real work in Spinoza's account, the communication of motions "in a certain fixed manner [certa quadam ratione]." After working through several translations of the Latin, I argue that what Spinoza has in mind here is best understood as a pattern of causal relations. This is the basis for Spinoza's solution to the problem of composition. The parts of a table bear a particular pattern of causal relations to one another, in virtue of which we say that those parts compose the table. The pattern of causal relations is supposed to explain how the parts compose a whole. I then appeal to this initial sketch of Spinoza's account of composition to answer two further questions about the metaphysics of composition. First, I consider whether Spinoza takes a whole to be identical with its parts. I argue that he does not, and that he instead takes a whole to be identical with the pattern of causal relations among its parts. Second, I consider whether Spinoza takes a whole to be prior to its parts. I argue, again, that he does not, and that he instead upholds a standard conception of parthood on which parts are prior to their whole. In Chapter 3,1 work out a detailed interpretation of what Spinoza must mean by a pattern ("rafzo") of causal relations. Although it is easy to see how his account of composition could explain why, e.g., the table top and legs compose an individual, it is difficult to see how the account can avoid absurditywhy don't two people shaking hands also stand in a pattern of causal relations? What relevant difference is there between these two cases? I propose that Spinoza can draw a sharp line between these two cases by appealing to his view that everything that exists has some causal power. As I argue, several things compose an individual just in case the causal relations among those things ground some further causal power. The table top and legs are

joined in such a way that their interaction grounds causal powers distinct from the causal powers of the parts taken singly (the power to hold dinner plates off the floor, for instance). Two people shaking hands, by contrast, seem to fail this test: they don't, in virtue of their interaction, ground any further power. Hence there is no reason to posit the existence of their composite. After fleshing out this view, I apply it to two other aspects of Spinoza's metaphysics, his philosophy of mind and his conatus doctrine. In Chapter 4,1 consider a variety of rival accounts of composition, both contemporary and historical. Leibniz, for example, develops the claim that several distinct things compose an individual only if the individual is a living organism. More recently, a number of prominent philosophers have argued that, contrary to intuition, every collection of distinct objects composes an individual. I first show why Spinoza must reject these views by highlighting the ways in which they conflict with certain of his metaphysical principles. Then I outline some reasons for thinking that those metaphysical principles are true, and that we too should reject these rival accounts. Finally, I attempt to provide some independent motivation for the account I attribute to Spinozaindependent, that is, of Spinoza's own reasons for adopting it. Finally, in Chapter 5, I consider the strongest contemporary argument against Spinoza's account, the argument from vagueness. The argument purports to show that any moderate account of compositionthat is, any account that (like Spinoza's) claims that certain conditions must be met in order for several individuals to compose a complex wholewill imply the possibility of vague existence. The idea is that if there are any conditions on composition, these conditions must be met in order that a given complex whole exists. But for any conditions whatever, there will be a possible scenario in which it is vague whether those conditions are met. So if there are any conditions on composition whatever, it is possible for existence to be

vague. Spinoza would not countenance vague existence, but that doesn't mean he must capitulate. I show that Spinoza can resist the argument from vagueness by appealing to principled sharp cutoffs: there will never be a possible scenario in which it is vague whether Spinoza's conditions on composition are met, though there will be some extremely similar scenarios that differ with respect to composition. However, those extremely similar scenarios will also always differ with respect to the causal relations they involve, a difference that is relevant to composition. That is the plan of the work. Before proceeding with my argument, however, let me say a few words about methodology. This is a work of history of philosophy, and during the past fifty years or so there have been some shifts in how the project of history of philosophy is understood. The conflict is this: When considering the works of a historical figure like Spinoza, do we isolate his axguments and tear into them using the best of our current analytical tools? Or do we instead try patiently to reconstruct the historical context of his writings, analyzing his axguments only insofar as they are elements of this larger intellectual constellation? For a time in the eaxly 20th century it was considered acceptable to do research on historical figures in philosophy in the former way only, by taking the standard English translation of a text and working it over with one's pet philosophical theory in mind.3 More recently, the pendulum has swung the other way, and now it is common for discussions of a philosopher to include extended analysis of his or her biography, culture, intellectual influences, and so on. It is almost impossible to find a book on Spinoza's philosophy that does not begin with a chapter on his biography. Spinoza's peculiar insights and the structure of his thought seem at once to defy and to demand translation into our contemporary idiom. He has accordingly been studied from both sidesas a historical figure reacting to certain intellectual currents
3See

Garber (2001, 3-6) for an amusing autobiographical discussion of this phenomenon.

in theology, science, and philosophy, and as a philosopher who presented a timeless metaphysical picture of the world, a picture that merits our consideration without worrying too much about its historical context.4 I cannot say for certain whether both approaches are equally appropriate in the general case. My own temperament as a historian of philosophy lies somewhere in between the two extremes. However, in the case of Spinoza, I think both approaches are not only appropriate, but are in fact necessary to understanding his philosophy. It is surely impossible to understand Spinoza's work without understanding that of Descartes and of Hobbes, without reading Spinoza's letters, or without taking careful stock of the original Latin text. Yet it is surely also interesting and philosophically fruitful to stretch Spinoza's already expansive and fascinating metaphysics to make contact with our own contemporary philosophical situation. More historically-minded historians of philosophy may not be convinced; but consider this. The terminology of Spinoza's arguments is hijacked from his historical predecessors (Aristotle, the Scholastics, Descartes, Hobbes, and so on) without citation or explicit reference, and he presents his conclusions as timeless metaphysical truths standing outside of any particular historical situation. Spinoza understood himself as working outside of, and often at odds with, the perspective of his day. The historical context of Spinoza's work is obscured by design. If we want to understand his system in the way that Spinoza would have wished, we need to consider it with the advantage of an outsider's perspective. The places that the system appears contradictory reveal its historically contextual assumptions. The charitable interpreter works through these apparent contradictions by uncovering the assumptions that resolve them. Ideally, the interpreter then vindicates those assumptions in a way that makes them plausible to contemporary readers while preserving the unity of the work
4Wolfson

(1983) takes the former tack, Bennett (1984) the latter, to pick two influential examples.

in question. It seems to me that this is precisely what Spinoza would have desired readers of his work to do. So although my approach to Spinoza involves a strange overlap of the historical and the contemporary, I maintain that this is the best lens through which to understand Spinoza's philosophy.

Chapter 1

Spinoza's Physics of Individuals

In this short chapter, I will lay the historical and philosophical groundwork needed in order to understand Spinoza's metaphysics of composition as it is presented in the Ethics.1 What Spinoza says about composition, he says (or says most cleaxly) using the language of physics. In the so-called "physical digression" after Ethics IIpl3s, Spinoza presents the following definition of composite individuals:
When a number of bodies, whether of the same or of different size, are so constrained by other bodies that they lie upon one another, or if they so move, whether with the same degree or different degrees of speed, that they communicate their motions to each other in a certain fixed manner, we shall say that those bodies are united with one another and that they all compose one body or individual, which is distinguished from the others by this union of bodies. (Definition after MIpl3s)

This passage is the core of Spinoza's physics of individuals, and in the series of lemmas that follow it he uses this definition to develop a sketchy but intriguing account of persistence. In chapter 2, I will present a reading of this passage as laying out the necessary and sufficient conditions for several things to compose one thing. However,
to Spinoza's Ethics, Descartes' Principles of Philosophy (PPC), Short Treatise on God, Man and His Weil-Being (KV), and Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (TIE) are from Spinoza (1988) (though references to the Latin are from Spinoza 1925). References to Spinoza's letters are from Shirley (1995), and references to the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (TTP) are to Shirley (2001). References to Descartes' Principia Philosophiae (PP) are from Descartes (1983) (though Latin references are from Descartes 1904). References to Hobbes' De Corpore (DC) are from Hobbes (1655), unless otherwise noted. I use original translations of Hobbes' Latin, with some guidance from the English translation in Hobbes (1905) and suggestions from Brian Marrin. Because Hobbes proofread and modified, but did not himself write, the translation in Hobbes (1905), there are occasional discrepancies between the two texts; it would require lengthy examination of the original manuscripts to discern which discrepancies are due to the translator and which are due to Hobbes' changes. I therefore use my own translations of passages from the Latin text, making reference to Hobbes (1905) where there are noteworthy discrepancies.
1 References

10

in order to develop such an interpretation, we first need to get clear on the meanings of the critical terms in the passage.

The main hurdle to understanding Spinoza's physics is that he uses terms that either have different meanings for him than they do for us, or that simply have no correlate in contemporary physics. Spinoza's conceptions of extension, motion, and rest pose particular difficulties, for although they are crucial to his discussion of material composition, they receive no more than a few sentences worth of explanation in the Ethics. By way of filling in this conspicuous absence, commentators have to date taken one of two approaches: either assume that Spinoza adopted the mechanistic physical theory of his predecessors, Descartes and Hobbes, or that he simply did not have a fleshed-out physical theory and uses the terms as "placeholders" for the fundamental physical concepts provided by some future theory.2 The way one answers this question has a rather large influence on how one understands Spinoza's account of composition. After considering the relevant aspects of the Cartesian and Hobbesian theories of physics, I ultimately conclude that Spinoza can adopt neither the Cartesian nor the Hobbesian notions of extension, motion, and rest. However, the investigation of Descartes does suggest an important way of understanding the phrase motus communicare that features in Spinoza's definition of individuals: it is a causal notion, such that when one body communicates motion to another body, the first body causes a change in the second. I will use this interpretation in the next chapter to argue that Spinoza intends to account for composition in terms of causation.

2See

Garrett (1994) and Bennett (1984, 106-110), respectively.

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1.1

The purported mechanical influence

The interpretive problem for us is that several vital technical terms in Spinoza's physics have obscure meaning. Even the most basic terms, 'body' and 'motion', are up in the air. Although we are given a definition of the term 'body'"By body I understand a mode that in a certain and determinate way expresses God's essence insofar as he is considered as an extended thing" (J57IIdl)it means little without a further definition of extension, which Spinoza does not give. Further, motion and rest are simply undefined in the Ethics. Their nature was the subject of much dispute during the seventeenth century, so it is unclear what conceptions of motion and rest Spinoza has in mind. Are they passive affections or dynamic forces? Are they different quantitative measures of the same quality, or axe they opposing qualities? These questions are not given direct answers in Spinoza's brief digression in the Ethics. If we are to answer them at all, it has commonly been thought that we must extrapolate the answers from Spinoza's other writingsspecifically his presentation of Descartes' physics in Descartes' Principles of Philosophy (PPC)or from other likely influences, such as Hobbes' On the Body {DC). This approach is not unreasonable, though I hope in this chapter to show that it is misguided. That said, it is well known that Spinoza read and was influenced by other aspects of both Descartes' and Hobbes' writings.3 There are clues that suggest he might have been adopting their conceptions of motion and rest, as well. Motion and rest played a central role in the accounts of physical phenomena developed by many proponents of the mechanical philosophy, such as Descartes and Hobbes. For
3The influence of Descartes is evident from the fact that Spinoza's first published work is a recapitulation of the first two books of Descartes' Principles. The influence of Hobbes is more subtle, but there are fairly clear allusions to Hobbist political philosophy in Ethics IV and Chapter 16 of the TTP. Since Spinoza also owned a copy of DC, one might suppose that Hobbes' influence on Spinoza's thought extended to arenas beyond the political.

12

these authors, all real variation in bodies was ultimately due to differences in the motions of the constituent parts of those bodies.4 Descartes writes:
...although our minds can imagine divisions [in matter], this imagining alone cannot change matter in any way; rather, all the variation of matter, or all the diversity of its forms, depends on motion. (PP 11.23)

Hobbes, who is elsewhere very critical of Cartesian physics, nevertheless adopts a very similar view, according to which "...it is necessary that change can be nothing else but motion of the parts of that body which is changed" (DC 9.9). Spinoza seems to agree about the role of motion and rest as the ultimate cause of real variation in matter. On his view, more complex bodies are composed from these simple ones, and can have more complex properties since they "can be affected in a great many other ways, and still preserve [their] nature" (EIIplSs L7s). Ultimately, however, the properties of these complex bodies are to be explained in terms of the motion and rest of the simple bodies that compose them. On a first reading, then, Spinoza agrees with Descartes and Hobbes that variation in bodies is due to the motions of their parts. Unfortunately, this observation is rather abstract and high-level. It does not tell us anything about what Spinoza thinks motion and rest actually are, it only tells us that he thinks motion and rest feature at the most basic level of the physical world. Indeed, this raises as many questions as it answers. In this section I will consider both of these possible influences on Spinoza's physics. My aim is to show that Spinoza could not plausibly have accepted the conceptions of extension, motion, or rest that are advocated by these authors. I will start with
advocates of the mechanical philosophy took an atomistic approach. On these accounts, most famously that of Gassendi, variation in matter is explained by the interactions among a few fundamental properties of the atoms composing that matter, e.g. size and shape. Spinoza does not seem to have been influenced by Gassendi, since Gassendi's account treats space as a background void or vacuum, an approach Spinoza repeatedly denounces. See especially Tpl5s.
4 Other

13

Hobbes, which I take to be the easy case, and then consider Descartes. The Cartesian and Hobbesian conceptions of these physical concepts either conflict with Spinoza's metaphysical principles, or they are unsuited to the work he seeks to put them to in his metaphysics. If I am right, one common reading of Spinoza's physics is wrong, and instead we ought to adopt the most plausible alternativesomething like Jonathan Bennett's "placeholder" interpretation of these passages. 1.1.1 Hobbes' physics

Spinoza's library contained a copy of Thomas Hobbes' vast work, Elementorum Philosophiae, a system of philosophy divvied into three parts: De Corpore, De Homine, and De Cive. Additionally, it is certain that Spinoza read and was strongly affected by Hobbes' political writings: the Ethics contains several discussions of the 'state of nature', and Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Pohticus includes an extended discussion of the natural rights of individuals that is almost strictly Hobbesian.5 The physical theory Hobbes presents in De Corpore includes definitions of space, time, motion and restterms that Spinoza's theory leaves almost entirely open. It might therefore seem reasonable to look to Hobbes' De Corpore for the inspiration and grounding for Spinoza's physical theory. This search proves to be in vain. As I will presently show, Hobbes' and Spinoza's ideas about the relative metaphysical priorities of space, time, bodies, and their motions are almost entirely at odds. However, comparing them reveals some important but unstated restrictions upon Spinoza's physics. These restrictions take us part of the way to an understanding of the physics of individuals. In spite of its title, the scope of De Corpore (DC) is not restricted to physics. The first six chapters of the text deal rather with logic and methodological concerns. By
5See,

e.g., IVp37 and TTP Ch. 16.

14

the time Hobbes gets down to the business of physics, he has already given a theory of properties, a theory of names and definitions, and an account of philosophical method. These foundational discussions serve to shape his presentation of physical concepts: rather than providing any sort of mathematical treatment of motion, he states a series of interrelated definitions of various physical phenomena and properties. Six of these definitions are relevant to the present discussion: space, time, body, place, motion, and rest.6 Space is the first physical concept that Hobbes defines, though he is somewhat cagey about it. Rather than simply presenting a metaphysical definition of space, he starts by giving a phenomenal definition, as follows:
Space is the phantasm of an existing thing, to the extent that it is existing, that is, with no other accident of the thing being considered except its appearance as external to the one imagining it. (DC 7.2)

This conception of space, which Hobbes sometimes refers to as imaginary space [Spatium Imaginarium], treats it as the extension of some imagined body, and hence as relative to our imagination. The idea is that in order to conceptualize space, we must imagine a body filling it, a 'phantasm' whose imagined size and shape delineate the space. This is not Hobbes' last word on the topic, however. He later contrasts imaginary space with real space:
The extension of a body is the same as its magnitude, or that which some call real space. (DC 8.4)

The difference is subtle, but crucial. Imaginary space, he explains, is "an Accident of the mind" whereas real space is an accident of "a body existing outside the mind"
of the other definitions should be of interest in Spinoza scholarship more generally: Hobbes' definition of the infinite bears striking similarity to Spinoza's definition of the 'infinite in its own kind' (Idl), and his definition of inertia (DC 8.19) is also close to Spinoza's (IIIpl3s, Lemma 3).
6Some

15

( D C 8.4). The former definition is epistemological or phenomenologicalat best it affords us a theory of spatial perceptionbut the latter definition is metaphysical, since it tells us what space is, full stop. On either definition, space is not understood as substantival, but as derivative of actually existing or imagined bodies. Without any actual or conceivable bodies, there would be no space. (To use some slightly anachronistic terminology, Hobbes is saying that any world that contains neither bodies nor minds is the empty worldthere is no possible world consisting solely of a spatial manifold.) Related to the concept of space is that of place, which Hobbes defines as follows:
...the Space (by which name I always understand the imaginary) that coincides with the magnitude of some body, is said to be the Place of that body. (DC 8.5)

Though place and bodily magnitude might seem identical since the one always coincides with the other, Hobbes is quick to differentiate them. A body's magnitude is a property of that body, and is moved along it, whereas a body's place changes whenever the body moves. When he moves to considering time, Hobbes at first seems to want to treat it analogously to space:
...a moving body leaves a Phantasm of its motion in the mind, doubtless the idea of the body in continuous succession of traversing, now in this space, now in another. And such an idea or Phantasm...I call Time. (DC 7.3)7

As with imaginary space, Hobbes here addresses our perception of time without giving a metaphysical account of it. The implicit claim is that time can only be conceptualized in terms of motion, but this does not tell us anything about the
motum motus sui Phantasma in animo relinquit, nimirum ideam corporis, nunc per hoc, nunc per aliud spatium continua successione transeuntis. Est autem talis idea sive Phantasma...appelio, Tempus."
7"...corpus

16

metaphysical priority of time with respect to motion. That is, our mode of epistemic access to time is through motion, but this does not rule out the possibility of time without motion; we simply wouldn't be able to perceive it. One might reasonably expect Hobbes to present a definition of 'real time' to complement the definition of 'real space'. Yet Hobbes states without reservation that there is no such thing as 'real time'. He explains,
For since all would confess a year to be time, and yet no one would think that a year is an accident or affection, or mode, of the body, so they must confess that time is found not in the actual things but in the thought of the mind; although people speak of the times of their elders, can it be that after their elders have ceased to exist, their times are anywhere other than in the recollection of memories? (DC ibid)

Time, in contrast to space, is a purely imaginary phenomenon based on our perception of motion. The distinction between time and space, on Hobbes' view, seems similar to the distinction Locke makes, much later, between primary and secondary qualities. Our idea of a space (an imaginary space) corresponds to and resembles the spatial magnitude of a body (a real space). However, though our idea of time is somehow based on or generated by the motion of a body, there is nothing in the body that corresponds to or resembles time. He then gives his final definition of time, leaning heavily on his view that time is essentially a figment of our imagination:
Therefore the full definition of time is this: Time is the Phantasm, of motion insofar as the motion is imagined as prior and posterior, or in succession. (DC ibid)

In spite of subtle differences in his treatment of space and time, Hobbes presents reductive accounts of bothhe reduces space to the extension of bodies and he reduces time to their motion. Although we sometimes describe space and time in substantival

17

terms, Hobbes clearly takes that to be nothing more than loose talk. Space and time are not substances in which bodies and their motions axe embedded or contained. Rather, bodies and their motions constitute the ontological basis for space and time. A world without motion, for Hobbes, is a world without time. The order of metaphysical dependence in Hobbes' metaphysicsflowing from bodies and motions to space and timegives his definitions of bodies and motions special importance. Yet his definition of body turns out to be circular.
...the definition of body is this:

Body is that which, not depending upon our thought, coincides or is coextended with some pari of Space. (DC 8.1)

The problem with this definition is that space has already been defined in terms of body. To define body in terms of space is circular, and seems to render vacuous Hobbes' whole system. Is it a vicious circularity? It certainly seems to be, as it is an instance of the smallest possible Cartesian circle: two definitions, each of which invokes the other. Any attempt to clarify the terms in either definition will need to refer to the other, and the reference to the other definition will in turn make reference to the first. The fact that these terms are interdefinable renders it impossible to use one to informatively account for the other. If the definition of body is circular, then the definitions of motion and rest are too: Motion is the continual abandonment of one place & acquisition of another. (DC 8.10) That which is in the same place for some amount of time is said to rest... (DC
8.11)

Both motion and place are explained in terms of the concept of place, which in turn is explained in terms of the concept of body. Since there are no primitives in which to

18

ground this series of definitions, Hobbes' physical theory falls again into circularity. Spinoza would have to reject this collection of definitions as failing to capture the essence of their objects.8 Furthermore, even if Hobbes produced some account of the apparent circularity, Spinoza would still have a substantive disagreement with Hobbes about the proper place of particular finite bodies relative to the whole of extension. Spinoza must reject the Hobbesian conception of extension as the sum total of "real space," for this conception entails that the whole of extension depends upon its parts. Spinoza's definition of a substance implies that extension is not simply the sum of the bodies it contains, contra Hobbes. On Spinoza's theory of attributes, extension (as an attribute of the one infinite substance) is infinite in its own kind, and is not dependent upon any other attribute (.EIplO, plls Sc pl2). There is and can be only one substanceDeus, sive Naturaand all bodies are merely modes of the attributes of this substance. However the relationship between substance and mode is construed, it is clear that Spinoza does not take bodies to be metaphysically prior to the attribute of extension.9 All of this suggests that Hobbes' influence on Spinoza's physics does not extend beyond the sharing of various technical terms. If we want the meanings of those terms for Spinoza, we must look elsewhere. 1.1.2 Descartes' physics

A few central physical conceptsextension, motion, rest, and the communication of motionappear in both Descartes' Principia and Spinoza's Ethics. At issue is whether both authors shared the same conceptions of these terms. Presently, I will argue that Spinoza rejects the standard Cartesian understanding of extension, motion, and rest, but accepts Descartes' causal conception of the communication of motions.
8I 9See

discuss Spinoza's views about definitions and essences in Chapter 3.3. especially 2?Ip25c, Ildl.

19

There is no doubt that Spinozaalong with most every intellectual working in the latter half of the seventeenth centurywas deeply influenced by the new Cartesian theory of physics. There is also no doubt that even the young Spinoza was deeply critical of aspects of Descartes' theory. In a letter to Henry Oldenburg from 1665, when Spinoza would have been near completion of a first draft of the Ethics,10 he writes,
...I think that regarding the sixth rule of Motion in Descartes, both [Huygens] and Descartes are quite in error... (Ep. 30a)

Descartes' sixth rule of motion says that in any collision of two bodies of equal size where one is in motion (body B) and one is at rest (body C), "necessarily, C would be to some extent driven forward by B and would to some extent drive B back in the opposite direction" (Descartes, 1983, rule 51). We post-Newtonians know betterB and C will simply exchange their velocity vectors, so B will end up at restbut at the time the laws governing the collision of rigid bodies were still hotly debated. (In the letter just quoted, Spinoza's reference to Christian Huygens is because Huygens had been proclaiming that he would soon release a treatise disproving and correcting the Cartesian laws of collision. Change was in the air.) In spite of these minor disagreements, the young Spinoza seems to have been willing to accept most of Descartes' physical theory. His criticisms of Descartes in his early work, Metaphysical Thoughts, had mostly to do with what he felt were philosophical or theological errors such as he found in the Cartesian account of the will.11 Could Spinoza's discussion of the physics of individuals after IIpl3s be relying upon Cartesian physics? I will argue that it cannot, on pain of contradicting Spinoza's metaphysical views. Let me begin by giving a brief picture of some of the interpretive concerns about
10See 11 See

the editor's preface to the Ethics in Spinoza (1988, 405). the introduction to Spinoza's PPC.

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Descartes' physics on which commentators have focused. As I proceed through these concerns, I will set aside those parts of the debate about Descartes' conception of motion that are irrelevant to my purposes. Then I will show that, on any standard reading of Descartes, Spinoza must reject the Cartesian conceptions of extension and motion.12 First, what is Descartes' conception of extension? We are told it is opposed to "weight, hardness, colour, or the like," and consists only in possession of "length, breadth, and depth" (PP II.4). These geometrical properties are the only essential features that a body has.13 Extension, then, is a geometrical space, with one caveat: that geometrical space is not to be understood as an empty space underlying or housing matter, the "corporeal substance". It is rather to be understood as the corporeal substance itself (11.11). To put the point another way, the fundamental properties of corporeal substance are geometrical properties. Second, what is Descartes' conception of motion (and rest)? The Cartesian conception of motion involves two levels. At what I will call the physical level, the motion and rest of a body's parts are supposed to provide the objective ground for all of its properties (PP 11.23). This suggests that motion and rest are, for Descartes, objective rather than (merely) relativethey must be generated by forces.u It isn't clear how
and rest are not, on the Cartesian theory, the result of two distinct kinds of force. They are both the result of the same force, and "in the strict sense" a body in motion is distinguished from a body at rest only in virtue of the spatial relations it bears to the bodies "which are in immediate contact with it" (PP 11.25). In my discussion to follow, I will often elide mention of rest because all of Descartes' claims about the property of being in motion apply also to the property of being at rest. 13It is only essential that a body have some quantity or other of length, breadth, and depth. The particular quantities may vary over time though the body remains the same. See Descartes' "wax argument" in the second of the Meditations (AT VII, 30). 14Much debate about Descartes' physics has focused upon whether or not it is kinematic (a theory about motions) or dynamic (a theory about the forces that cause motions). See, e.g., Gabbey (1971), Blackwell (1966, 222), Slowik (1999, Sec. 5), Gaukroger (2002, Ch. 4). I will bypass most of this debate; suffice it to say that the consistency of Descartes' system hinges upon its inclusion of a dynamic component, for without appeal to underlying forces Descartes' version of relativity of
12Motion

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a fundamentally geometrical entity like a Cartesian body could have causal power, but it is clear that Descartes speaks as if they can, so let's say the bodies' motions are caused by their pushing and pulling on one another. (I'll say more about where these pushings and pullings come from in a moment.) Descartes also tells us that the only causal power that bodies have is their tendency to persist in the same state, so the power of bodies is in some sense purely reactive (PP 11.43).15 Putting these claims together: all the properties of a body are due to its extended parts moving (or staying at rest), these motions are the result of forces causing the bodies to push and pull one another, and these pushings and pullings are the result of each part's tendency to persist in its current state of motion or rest. This general picture is a central component of Descartes' conception of motion. At the metaphysical level, however, Descartes adds a further story about where the forces behind each body's motion come from, and in what those forces inhere. This is where interpretations of Descartes diverge. On one interpretationthe occasionalist reading, already mentionedCartesian bodies themselves are intrinsically inert, and they obtain their causal "power to act on, or resist, other bodies" (PP 11.43) from God, who continually preserves the same quantity of motion in the world (11.36).
motion is too strong, even by his own lights. The Cartesian rules of collision distinguish between (1) a body in motion colliding with a smaller body at rest, and (2) a body in motion colliding with a larger body at rest (see PP 11.46-52), yet without a way objectively to pick out which body is in motion and which is at rest, these two cases collapse. In itself, this would not be a problemDescartes would merely have used more ink than strictly necessary. Unfortunately, Descartes actually predicts different outcomes for the two cases, so that the motions, and hence the resulting positions, of the two bodies after collision will differ depending upon which body was moving and which was at rest. The Cartesian system therefore predicts contradictory outcomes, in virtue of taking motion to be totally relative to the situation of the observer (PP 11.29). According to a frame of reference in which the smaller body is moving and the larger is at rest, one outcome is predicted; according to a different frame in which the larger body is moving and the smaller is at rest, a completely different outcome is predicted. Yet both reference frames are equally valid from the point of view of the theory. So we need to appeal to forces to fix the appropriate frame of reference. I think this suggests that we should take Descartes' claim that bodies have the power (or force) to act on other bodies as more than just loose talk; without that claim, the system is contradictory. 15Cf. Descartes' arguments for the three laws of nature at PP 11.37, 39, and 40.

22

Indeed, not only does God continually preserve the quantity of motion in all matter, he "preserves all this matter in the same way, and by the same process, by which he originally created it" (ibid). So, since all of the apparent causal power of a Cartesian body is really nothing over and above the causal power of God, the proponent of the occasionalist reading says that Cartesian bodies do not have any causal power or efficacy.16 On another interpretationthe concurrentist readingCartesian bodies have some genuine power even though God's concurrence is necessary for that power. The concurrentist reading affirms all of the facts about God's creation and continual preservation that the occasionalist reading affirms, but denies that these facts rule out attributing genuine causal power to bodies. That is, the proponent of the concurrentist reading simply rejects the last step in the occasionalist's reasoning: it is irrelevant that all of the causal power of a body is continually preserved by, and ultimately due to, God. Rather, God has the power, and the body has it.17 On either reading, Descartes' conception of motion and rest includes both a physical level, at which motion and rest ground all other extended properties, and a metaphysical level, at which motion and rest are imparted to and sustained in bodies by God. I want to set aside the question of whether Cartesian bodies axe properly said to act upon one another, or are only acted upon by God. That question, while interesting, turns out to be irrelevant to our main concern: what aspects of the Cartesian picture could Spinoza adopt? And, more importantly, what aspects of that picture did he adopt? Taking the second question first, there is nice evidence that Spinoza did in fact
Garber (2001a). (Cf. Garber 2001b). Delia Rocca (1999): "it [is] more plausible that [Descartes] holds that bodies cause changes in motion and do so, indeed, not despite the fact that God causes changes in motion, but because of that fact" (49). Pessin (2003) likewise develops a case for reading Descartes as a certain sort of concurrentist.
17See 16See

23

reject the Cartesian conception of extension. A decade after Spinoza's mild criticism of Descartes' rules of collision, he condemns the very foundation of Cartesian physics in a curt but revealing letter to E. W. v. Tschirnhaus: ...from Extension as conceived by Descartes, to wit, an inert mass, it is...quite impossible to demonstrate the existence of bodies. For matter at rest, as far as in it lies, will continue to be at rest, and will not be set in motion except by a more powerful external cause.18 For this reason I have not hesitated on a previous occasion to affirm that Descartes' principles of natural things are of no service, not to say quite wrong. (Ep. 81) This terse characterization of Descartes' view highlights the importance of the active nature of substance in Spinoza's philosophy. Spinoza's criticism of the Cartesian theory is that, since it treats bodies as mere "inert masses," it cannot account for the dynamic interactions between bodies.19 Descartes might reply that since extended substance is inert mass, any apparently dynamical interactions between such substances must be explained by the action of an external thingbut from Spinoza's perspective, this reply simply amounts to the denial that there are any extended substances at all. For this reason, along with his other metaphysical commitments, Spinoza comes down on the side of a dynamic conception of extension: bodies, as finite expressions of extended substance, exert forces upon one another. Spinoza appears to think that the Cartesian picture rules this out. So it seems that Spinoza came to reject the Cartesian conception of extension because he took Descartes to be committed to an occasionalist conception of motion that is, Spinoza thought that Descartes' view entails that it is impossible for finite
translation has the awkward phrase "as far as in it lies" for the Latin quantum in se est, which features prominently in Spinoza's conatus doctrine at IIIp6. See Cohen (1964) for the classic discussion of the role of this ubiquitous phrase in seventeenth century natural philosophy. In my discussion of Spinoza's conatus doctrine in Chapter 3, I will advert to the slightly less cumbersome translation, "insofar as it is in itselP. 19Though see Donagan (1988, 99-100) for an interesting opposing reading of the relevant passages in Ep. 82 & 83: "[Spinoza's] objection to Descartes was that, having correctly identified one of Nature's infinite attributes, Descartes spoiled his achievement by thinking of extension as an abstractly conceivable property, and not as expressing an eternal and infinite essence..." (ibid).
18Shirley's

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bodies to cause one another to move. As I suggested above, this is not to say that Descartes was in fact an occasionalist of this sort, nor that he recognized his view as entailing occasionalism. If the concurrentist reading of Descartes is a live possibility, then the Cartesian system need not be occasionalist. My claim here is that Spinoza thought the Cartesian conception of extension led to occasionalism, and for this reason rejected it. What about our other question: should Spinoza have rejected this conception of extension? I think the answer, given Spinoza's other metaphysical views, is yes. Spinoza rejects as mystical nonsense the premise that an immaterial being (the Cartesian God) could causally interact with the material world, which premise is fundamental to Descartes' conception of extension on any available interpretationwhether motion is due to God's direct action, or only due to his concurrent action, motion is due to God's action. At the metaphysical level, then, Descartes' conception of extension is simply incompatible with Spinoza's. The possibility of either occasionalism or concurrentism is ruled out by Spinoza's view that the attributes of God (thought and extension) cannot interact: bodies act on bodies and ideas act on ideas, but ideas do not act on bodies or vice versa (J57IIIp2). Unless God is an extended thing, there is no conceivable way for it to act upon the material world (EIpl5s). Spinoza therefore rejects the Cartesian picture of an external creator-god sustaining the world from moment to moment.20 But this part of the picture underlies both Descartes' conception of extension and his conception of motion, insofar as these conceptions require either God's direct action or His concurrence.
is a way in which Spinoza's picture might look like the Cartesian one. Spinoza's reason for thinking that bodies have causal power is that "Whatever exists expresses the nature, or essence of God in a certain and determinate way... [so] some effect must follow [from their nature]" ('Ip36d). So, like Descartes, it seems that the causal power of a body is ultimately due to God. However, although the power or force that Spinoza assigns to bodies is ultimately a manifestation of God's causal power, that power is not (as Descartes would have it) due to a creator-God acting upon a world external to Him.
20There

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So Spinoza must, and does, reject the Cartesian conception of extension as fundamentally inert, and the Cartesian conception of motion as due to the actions of an external, immaterial God. Nonetheless, there is one technical notion from the Cartesian physics that I think Spinoza did adopt: the communication of motion.

The communication of motions There is textual evidence that Descartes' usage of the phrase "x communicates motion to y" is intended to imply that x exerts a force upon y. The phrase does not appear often in the Principia, and when it does, it appears as a synonym for the phrase "x transfers motion to yn. For instance, at PP 11.51, the sixth rule governing the collision of bodies in Descartes' physics, he writes, "Thus if [a body] B were to approach [a body] C with four degrees of speed, it would communicate one degree to C..." (my emphasis; cf. a similar example at PP 11.49). Elsewhere in the collision rules, describing the same phenomenon, Descartes does not use the idiom of communication of motions. Instead he states that one body transfers [transfert, or the subjunctive transferret] its motion to another. It therefore seems that Descartes intended the two phrases to be synonymous: x "communicates" motion to y whenever x "transfers" motion to y, and vice versa. Earlier, at PP 11.25, Descartes uses the term 'transference' in his definition of motion. After stipulating that motion is "the transference of one part of matter...from the vicinity of those bodies immediately contiguous to it and considered as at rest, into the vicinity of others," he explains, I also say that it is a transference [translationem], not the force or action which transfers [non vim vel actionem quae transfert], in order to show that this motion is always in the moving body and not in the thing which

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moves it... The distinction Descartes is trying to emphasize is between the verb "transfers" and the noun "transference".21 The subject of the verb "transfers", for Descartes, is supposed to be the cause of the ensuing action. If we combine Descartes' intended meaning for the verb "transfers" with the fact that he takes "transfers motion" to be synonymous with "communicates motion," we obtain a causal interpretation of the communication of motions. One body communicates motion to another only if the first exerts some force upon the second, causing it to move. The result of all this is a simple observation that will be useful to us in analyzing Spinoza's physics: whatever else might be said about the communication of motions, it is a fundamentally carnal relation. That Spinoza adopts this dynamic and causal understanding of communicated motions is suggested by his definition of individuals (quoted above). Recall that he sets aside several sorts of relations between bodies as irrelevant to their composition: it is supposed to be irrelevant "whether [bodies are] of the same or of different size," or whether they move "with the same degree or different degrees of speed" (E'UplSs, Def). Why? I claim that Spinoza's reason for discounting these relations (i.e., being of a different size than... and moving at a different speed than...) is that they are not causal relations. That is, they are not born by two bodies in virtue of any causal power that one exerts on the other; they merely mark a comparative difference in the bodies' properties. Spinoza seems to be assuming that composition must involve some genuine interaction among the composing bodies. Given the proposed interpretation of Descartes' notion of the communication of motions, it is plain to see why Spinoza
21It might be more proper to translate translationem here as "translation" in its geometrical sense. Miller and Miller (in Descartes 1983) use "transference" to highlight the distinction Descartes wants to draw between the action (the transference) and its cause (that which transfers). Since this distinction is my focus here, I take up Miller and Miller's translation.

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claims that relation is relevant to composition. Since Spinoza (along with Descartes and Hobbes) thinks that any property of any extended thing is ultimately reducible to motion and rest, the communication of motions turns out to be the fundamental causal relation that extended things bear to one another. All extended causal relations are reducible to the communication of motions among bodies, so the composition of any extended thing is reducible to the communication of motions among bodies. Why should composition ultimately reduce to a causal relation of some sort? I think the answer here lies in Spinoza's understanding of causation as involving conceptual dependence. For one thing to cause another implies that there is some conceptual connection between the two, such that the effect can be understood through the cause ('Ia4). So the reason that the communication of motions is essential to the composition of an individual from a group of bodies is that their communication of motions is what makes those bodies mutually dependent upon one another. It is the reason they must be conceived as a unified wholeit explains how, as Spinoza puts it in a famous letter, their natures are "adapted" to one another.22 Merely comparative relations do not mark such dependence, only causal relations do; and communication of motions is the relevant causal relation when we are considering bodies. 1.1.3 The Alternative

So, Spinoza seems to have adopted neither Descartes' nor Hobbes' conceptions of motion and rest. He does not lay out any alternative definitions, either in the Ethics or elsewhere. Yet motion and rest are the fundamental properties of extended things, those properties from which all other properties of extended things are derived. What, then, are we to say about Spinoza's conceptions of motion and rest? Bennettwho leapfrogs to this conclusion without considering Spinoza's philosoph22See

Ep. 32. I discuss this letter at length in Chapter 5.

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ical predecessorshas suggested that 'motion and rest' is simply shorthand for the fundamental qualities of some yet-to-be-established physical theory, whatever they may turn out to be (Bennett, 1984, 106-10). While Bennett's suggestion is perhaps too generous, Spinoza's explicit dismissal of the Cartesian notion of extension (quoted above) lends some credence to the idea that Spinoza recognized the difficulties in extant definitions of basic physical concepts, but (for whatever reason) was not very concerned with making precise his own alternative conceptions of these things. The situation is this: Spinoza must reject the Cartesian and the Hobbesian conceptions of extension and their accompanying conceptions of motion and rest; yet motion and rest are presented in the Ethics as the most primitive modes of extended things, from which all variation in extension is ultimately derived. This suggests that Bennett's somewhat haphazard reading is in fact close to the mark. Motion and rest are best understood as names for whatever happen to be the most fundamental opposing qualities of extended things, those qualities ultimately responsible for variation in extended things. "Communication of motions" is then simply a name for whatever the fundamental physical causal relation turns out to be. I am not entirely comfortable with this reading, as it involves rather zealous application of the principle of charity: it gives just a bit too much to Spinoza to be completely plausible as an interpretation. Nonetheless, for whatever reason, Spinoza chose not to wade very deeply into the murky lake of seventeenth century physical theory. The focus of his discussion of physics is on composition and persistence, and these are properly metaphysical topics that transcend any particular physical theory. Now, having explained how Spinoza's physics can (and cannot) be interpreted, we are ready to connect this interpretation with his definition of composite individuals.

Chapter 2

Spinoza's Account of Composition

Physics need not guide philosophy, but in this case it does; Spinoza's physics of individuals suggests a certain metaphysics of composition. In this chapter, I will develop the main outlines of Spinoza's account of composition as it is presented in the Ethics. My approach takes two steps. In the first step, I will outline and interpret Spinoza's discussion of material composition, based on the dynamic interpretation of his physics proposed in the previous chapter. Then I will articulate the general (attribute-neutral) account of composition which I take to be motivating that account of material composition. Suppose there axe several things, call them the xs. Under what conditions is there a single individual, call it y, such that the xs compose yl The problem, in other words, is to figure out what conditions (if any) must obtain in order for several things to compose a single thing. Call this the special composition question; a variety of responses to it are available. (Nihilism: no xs compose any y. Universalism: all xs compose some y. Contact: the xs compose a y whenever the xs are topologically connected. Organicism: the xs compose a y whenever the xs constitute a life. And so on.1)
has been most famously advocated by Lewis (1986, 212-3) and Sider (2003, 12032); I consider Sider's argument (the Argument from Vagueness) in chapter 5. More recently, a number of philosophers (including, surprisingly, Sider 2009) have articulated defenses of Nihilism. Contact is not generally taken to be a viable answer to the special composition question. (Something like Contact is implicitly endorsed in the mereotopology of Casati & Varzi (1999), but their interest is in the structure needed for the representation of composite objects rather than the metaphysical question about their existence.) And van Inwagen (1995) gives the classic articulation and defense of Organicism, though more recently Merricks (2001) has argued for a view in between Organicism
1 Universalism

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In traditional Aristotelian and Scholastic metaphysics, composition is accounted for in terms of substance, that is, as the unity of matter with a substantial form. For instance, Leibniz, who advocates a roughly Scholastic view of composition, accounts for the difference between the unity of the parts of a sheep and the (merely apparent) unity of the parts of a block of marble by claiming that former constitute a substance and the latter do not. If several parts do not constitute a substance, then they are not genuinely unifiedthey present the appearance of composing an individual, but that appearance is in some sense illusory, like the appearance of a rainbow.2 Spinoza's views on composition are of particular interest because, unlike the Scholastics (and Leibniz), he does not want to account for composition in terms of the concept of substance. Spinoza is a substance monist, and sees all particular things as modes inhering in the one infinite substance. He cannot appeal to substance to account for composition, for neither the parts of a sheep nor the parts of a block of marble constitute a substance. Spinoza cannot appeal to substance to account for composition, so he appeals to causal power instead. I claim that Spinoza's account of composition is: COMPOSITION: Some things compose an individual if and only if they instantiate a pattern [ratio] of causal relations. A number of commentators on Spinoza's physics of individuals have adopted a view close to this, but their interest has been to draw out the lessons of Spinoza's physics for his account of individuation or his account of persistence. My aim here is further to develop the consequences of this claim as an answer to the special composition
and Nihilism on which some xs compose an individual just in case they constitute a person (and specifically a conscious person). This dissertation will engage with many of these views at various points throughout, but I consider them in detail in Chapter 4. 2See Leibniz's letter to Arnauld, Leibniz (1989, Nov. 28-Dec. 8 (1686)).

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question, in order to leaxn more about what things Spinoza's ontology includes.3 More must be said about what it means for several things to "instantiate a pattern of causal relations." But even this initial sketch of Spinoza's account allows us to answer several interesting questions about Spinoza's understanding of the metaphysics of part and whole. The special composition question is about the relations that must be exemplified by several things in order for them to compose one thing. There is another, closely related question with a similarly grand tradition in metaphysics: supposing that the xs compose y, what exactly is the relation between the xs and yl Contemporary metaphysicians call this the general composition question.4 One prominent answer to this question in recent decades has been, "The parts and the whole stand in the relation of identity, the whole is nothing more than its parts (or: nothing more than its parts, arranged in a certain way)." Given certain of Spinoza's other metaphysical views, however, I will argue that he rejects this version of composition as identity. Instead, he takes a whole to be identical with the arrangement of its partsmore precisely, a composite individual is identical with the pattern of causal relations instantiated by its parts.
(1984, 232), Garrett (1994, 82-97), Garber (1994, 54-55), Delia Rocca (1996a, Ch. 2), Barbone (2002) and Lin (2005, 248-252) each agree that we should take ratio to mean something like "pattern," and recognize that any composite individual has such a pattern. (These authors sometimes use different terms, but the spirit of their interpretation is the same. For example, Garber sometimes uses "rational organization" and "stable configuration" to refer to what I am calling patterns. Delia Rocca uses the more open translation "relation", but I think this is meant simply to stand opposed to traditional interpretations on which ratio is taken to denote a mathematical ratio. Viljanen (2007, 409-410) likewise develops a view on which "the metaphysical description of an individual involves a fixed arrangement of interaction between power quanta [which is] the relation of motion and rest between the bodies composing the individual." As I understand them, each of these views is compatible with COMPOSITION. Any differences we have will come in how best to understand how best to understand these patterns (or "configurations", or "arrangements"). 4The two questions are mostly independent, but not strictly logically independent. If one answers the special composition question by saying, "Necessarily, no xs compose any y, regardless of the relations among the xs," then that answer will clearly entail a certain answer to the general composition question. However, in every other case I am aware of, one's answer to the former question does not determine one's answer to the latter.
3Bennett

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Finally, a third question that has been particularly relevant in contemporary discussions of monism is: supposing that the xs compose y, must the :cs be prior to y? Since Spinoza is a monist, it might be thought that he would say that the whole is prior to its parts. I will argue to the contrary that, given his account of composition, Spinoza ought to take parts to be prior to the whole they compose. I will close the chapter by highlighting some passages which suggest that this is indeed his view. 2.1 Spinoza on Composition I will first argue that Spinoza endorses COMPOSITION as an answer to the special composition question. I'll proceed by first arguing that Spinoza endorses a version of COMPOSITION restricted to material things (bodies), and then arguing that his metaphysical principles force him to accept COMPOSITION without restriction to bodies. Spinoza's account of material composition is given as part of an extremely condensed discussion of physics in Ethics II, often called the "Physical Digression."5 There, he gives the definition quoted in the previous chapter: When a number of bodies, whether of the same or of different size, are so constrained by other bodies that they lie upon one another, or if they so move, whether with the same degree or different degrees of speed, that they communicate their motions to each other in a certain particular pattern [certa quadam ratione\, we shall say that those bodies are united with one another and that they all compose one body or individual, which is distinguished from the others by this union of bodies. ("Definition" after 2IIpl3s)6 As I said, most commentators have focused upon the role this passage plays in setting up Spinoza's accounts of individuation and persistence. Let's instead read this passage
will assume in what follows that the conditions given in the quoted definition are intended to be singly necessary and jointly sufficient for composition. The text is ambiguous regarding necessity Spinoza only explicitly claims that they are sufficientbut it seems reasonable to suppose that in order for Spinoza's definition of composite individuals to be a definition, it must be a necessary as well as sufficient condition on composition. 6I have slightly modified the translation from Spinoza (1988).
5I

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through the lens of the special composition question. Suppose there axe several things, the xs. When do the xs compose an individual, y? Spinoza's claim in the quoted passage only gives us a partial answer. When do several extended things compose an extended individual? When those things "lie upon one another" or "communicate their motions to each other in a certain particular pattern." At first glance, it looks like Spinoza is giving a disjunctive account of material composition. However, I think the former condition should be read as a special case of the latter. If the x's lie upon one another, then Spinoza surely assumed that they would communicate their motions to one another.7 So the composition of bodies is ultimately characterized by reciprocal communication of motions among those bodies "in a certain particular pattern [certa quadam ratione]." "Certa quadam ratione...'''' I have argued that the central condition Spinoza places on composition is expressed in this sentence from the quote above, "if [some bodies] so move...that they communicate their motions to each other in a certain particular pattern...they all together compose one body or individual..." (emph. added). Given that we have come to an understanding about what Spinoza means by the communication of motions, we now need to pinpoint the role that this relation of communicated motion is supposed to play in the account. In asking whether some xs compose an individual, not just any communication of their motions seems to be relevant. The sentence just quoted involves a peculiar condition on the way in which motions must be communicated among the xsnamely,
Spinoza had his doubts about aspects of Descartes' physics (as I discussed in Chapter 1), he never expressed any doubts about Descartes' plenum theory. Part of that theory involves the claim that whenever a body moves, it communicates its motion to all immediately surrounding bodies (PP 11.33). So Spinoza would have assumed that several bodies "constrained by other bodies [so] that they lie upon one another" would communicate their motions to one another.
7Although

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the xs must communicate their motions among one another "in a certain particular pattern". Turning to the Latin here clarifies the scene a bit, but we need to do some more work to make sense of it. The text reads, "ut motus suos invicem certa quadam ratione communicent..." The key phrase is "certa quadam ratione". Curley translates this as "in a certain fixed manner", which translation I have implicitly rejected; let me first give an argument for my preferred translation, then evaluate the view my translation attributes to Spinoza. 'Ratio' (the nominative of ratione) might just as easily be translated 'pattern', 'system', 'scheme', or even 'procedure', though this last would be a stretch given the context. I will follow a number of recent commentators in taking 'ratao' to mean a pattern rather than a mathematical ratio.8 It is, in any case, easy to see why we should take the Latin 'ratio' to denote something other than a mathematical ratio. Spinoza intends a thing's ratio of communicated motions to explain its persistence through changes; but mathematical ratio of the motions (or even the forces) that an individual's parts communicate to one another is capable of drastic variation even in quite ordinary circumstances. When I am sitting sedately, the parts of my body do bear a certain mathematical ratio of communicated motions (primarily dictated by my heart rate and breathing); but if I stand up and go for a jog, that ratio will certainly not be preserved. It is hard to see why Spinoza would have made such a mistake, especially when the text easily supports an alternative reading. While the notion of a pattern is a bit unclear as yet, it is enough for now to get at the basic idea underlying Spinoza's account of composition.9 We further know that the pattern governing the communication of motions must be a "certain particular" one. There is an ambiguity in the Latin that is not marked by
fn. 3 above. Each of the authors cited there concurs that the rationes in question should not be understood literally as mathematical ratios. 9I return to (and flesh out) the notion of a pattern in Ch. 3.
8 See

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Curley, namely whether 'certa' ought to be translated as 'certain'Curley's choice or as 'determined'. Curley's choice is probably motivated by the fact that elsewhere in the Ethics, Spinoza uses the adjective ' determinata' in a way that is pretty clearly intended to mean that the object is determined (,Ip26&7). Spinoza's language is usually carefully chosen, especially when he is using terms in a technical way. It would therefore be odd for him to switch from 'determinatd' to 'certa' when expressing the same technical notion. Let's follow Curley in translating 'certa' as 'certain'. 'Quadam' presents a similar ambiguity. Curley's choice here, 'fixed', is adequate, but 'quadam' only has one of the several senses of that English term. Specifically, the Latin 'quadam' translates to 'fixed' only in its sense of denoting particularity or specificity. Importantly, it does not have the sense of denoting being unchanging or unmoving. So Curley's translation is less than optimal. The ambiguity, though, is that 'quadam' may also be used simply to soften an otherwise strong description, along the lines of the English phrase, "What one might call..." or "Something like..." If Spinoza is using the sense preferred by Curley, then ' quadam' does not add much to the sentence. "Certa quadam ratione" would, on that reading, translate to "in a certain particular pattern," and it is unclear what would be lost if we simplified this to "in a certain pattern." If, by contrast, Spinoza is using the softening sense of 'quadam\ the translation comes out as, "in what one might call a certain pattern." I do not ultimately think that this second reading is right, but I do not have any straightforward reason for thinking so. The softening sense of 1 quadam' just doesn't fit with Spinoza's usually bold style, especially in his definitions, whereas he commonly uses redundant descriptions as ways of specifying his meaning.10
best example of Spinoza's redundancy, even in crucial claims, is his unusual way of expressing his conatus doctrine. Delia Rocca (1996b) has observed that Spinoza's claim that "each thing, insofar as it is in itself, strives to persevere in its being" (IIIp6) is redundant, in that the standard Cartesian sense of the expression lx does F insofar as it is in itself' and of the expression 'x strives to do F' are equivalent. So Spinoza's claim appears literally to mean, "For each thing x, x's state
10The

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"In a certain particular pattern" therefore seems to be a good translation of the key phrase, "certa quadam ratione". So what does it mean to say that some bodies communicate their motions to one another in a certain particular, presumably complex, pattern? The communication of motions is itself a relation, of course, and we know that the communication of motions required by Spinoza's definition is intended to be two-waythe bodies "communicate their motions to each other in a certain particular pattern". This suggests that the objects instantiating the pattern are not supposed to be the bodies communicating their motion, but the occurrences of the communication of motion relation that those bodies exemplify. If the xs compose an individual, the causal interactions among the xs are not momentary or accidental, but are (in some sense) the way the xs normally act on one another.11 We will want to know more about what it means for occurrences of communicated motion to follow a pattern, but already this interpretation suggests a few things about the internal structure of individuals. First, to say that the communication of motions happens in accordance with a certain pattern leaves open the question of how dense the network of causal powers binding the bodies must be. On the face of it, the network of interactions connecting composing bodies could be quite sparse. If this is right, it is not necessary for the bodies to communicate their motions to each of
is such that, unless prevented by external causes, x's state will be such that, unless prevented by external causes, x will persevere in its being" (198). But this is nonsensical, so "the best course is to read it as if Spinoza had used only one of the pair of terms 'insofar as it is in itself' and 'strives"' (199). nThis is a rough sketch of the view, since I do not think Spinoza's views on teleology ultimately allow him to appeal to the paradigmatic "normal" functioning of an individual in a robust Aristotelian sense. As I see it, Spinoza would want such rough characterizations of "normal activity" to be scrubbed out of the most careful formulation of the theory and replaced with statements referring only to the efficient causal relations among the individual's parts. The metaphysician should not be satisfied with explanations from final causes, for "all final causes are nothing but human fictions" (El Appendix; Geb 11/80). How, and whether, the elimination of teleological explanation should be carried out is a matter of debate among commentators. (To pick two prominent examples, Bennett (1984, 213-26; cf. 244-246) argues that Spinoza wholly rejects teleology. Garrett (1999) replies that Spinoza in fact makes room for a certain sort of teleological explanation, namely the explanation of an action by appeal to the consciously intended goal of the action.)

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the others: several bodies might indeed communicate their motions to each of the others, but this is not the only conceivable relation of communicated motions that they might bear. In other words, Spinoza should be read as requiring only that each body's motions be communicated to some, not necessarily all, of the others. Requiring that any one of the bodies communicate their motions immediately to all the others would be too strong on the face of it, for it would rule out taking the human body to be a composite individual, yet that is the one composite individual that Spinoza needs for his later arguments.12 Most things that we recognize as composite individuals have distinct parts that are causally connected only transitively. My brain does not immediately cause my hand to move, but starts a chain of causal events mediated through other parts of the body. Further, when my brain causes my hand to move, it need not cause any motion in my toes. Second, and related to the fact that the definition does not require direct communication connecting every part, it would seem unnecessary for each part to communicate its motions to the same connecting part. The pattern governing the communication of motions among the various bodies need not be uniform. Whenever one of the bodies moves, its motion will produce a range of effects in the other bodiesbut the size of this range will vary from motion to motion, from body to body. For any given part, some of its motions might be communicated to one part, other motions to another part. Some motions may produce drastic consequences throughout the rest of the communicating bodies, while others may have almost negligible effect. The network of causal powers binding the bodies will therefore often be distributed unevenly: some parts will communicate all of their motions to the same part, while others will communicate some motions to one part, some to another. The causal structure of an individual may be quite imbalanced.
12See

the propositions immediately following the Physical Digression, IIpl4 and onward.

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The final axis upon which we might measure the density of the network of causal relations connecting the given bodies is whether or not each of them communicates every motion it undergoes. Again, since the pattern governing the communication of motions among the bodies is left almost entirely open, it does not seem necessary for each of the bodies to communicate their entire range of motions. Most machines are constructed so that each part communicates a certain range of motions to the other parts. For instance, tires and wheels generally communicate any motions perpendicular to their direction to the rest of the vehicle, but need not communicate their rotation; think of holding a bike off the ground and spinning the front wheel. The pattern governing the communication of motions could be such that very few of each body's motions are communicated to the othersthe majority of the motions each part undergoes might amount to spinning its wheels, leaving the rest of the parts unchanged. In other words, the network of causal powers binding the bodies may be quite weak. The upshot of this reading of the "certain specific pattern" clause is this. In order that the xs compose an individual, it is not required that each x communicate its motions to every other x, nor that it communicate its motions to the same x, nor even that it communicate all of its motions to the xs. There is a wide variety of causal structures in which bodies may stand in order to satisfy Spinoza's requirement. From Physics to Metaphysics As a first approximation of Spinoza's account of composition, then, we might use: BODIES: Some bodies compose an individual if and only if they instantiate a pattern of communicated motions.13
might seem troubling that I have not yet mentioned Spinoza's definition of singular things at Elld7. After all, doesn't that passage present an account of composition too? Be not troubled;
13It

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Depending upon how we make good on the notion of a pattern, this account looks promising. In order for several material things to compose a unified whole, it makes sense to require that they have causal unity, so that what happens to one part has some effect upon the others (even if only indirectly). Given that Spinoza counts the human body as a paradigmatic individual, these patterns must be fairly unrestrictive, however. On this account, a human body is an individual composed of various body parts (limbs, torso, and head), each of which are themselves composite things with various structures of parts. These parts communicate their motions to the others in a very obvious way, literally sending signals to one another via nerves, muscular flexion, and so on. But not only living things instantiate patterns of this sort. A table will also count as an individual, one composed of several legs and a rigid surface. Why? The motions of any one of the parts will be communicated to the others in virtue of their connection. (A problem to keep our eyes on at this stage is that this seems to open Spinoza up to the objection that two humans shaking hands will compose an individual body. I will return to this objection in the next chapter.) However, this fragmentary account leaves untouched a fairly important part of the problem of composition. Although it has the potential to account for composite bodies, it says nothing directly about ideas, perceptions, minds and so on. Yet one kind of composite thing that Spinoza has a particularly vested interest in accounting for is the human mind. What is it in virtue of which several ideas compose an individual mind, for Spinoza? What we need is a fully general account of composition, one that is "attribute-neutral" in the sense that it does not involve reference to any properties or relations specific either to bodies or to minds. To obtain such a reading, we can appeal to Spinoza's doctrine of the parallelism between thought and extension;
in Chapter 3 I will argue that all singular things are finite individuals and all finite individuals are singular things.

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however, to understand how the parallelism applies to composition, we need to get clear on what Spinoza understands the communication of motions to be.14 Spinoza leaves the term 'communication of motion' undefined in the Ethics, which leaves us to draw out his meaning from the historical context. Generally in such situations, it is useful to look to Descartes. In this case, it is particularly helpful. As I argued in the previous chapter, for Descartes, one body communicates motion to another only if the first exerts some force upon the second, causing it to move. The communication of motions is a causal relation. And since Spinoza takes motion and rest to be the properties that fundamentally individuate extended things, the communication of motions is going to be the fundamental causal relation bourn by extended things.15 When Spinoza requires that the parts of a composite individual communicate their motions to one another, then, he is really requiring of them that they stand in certain causal relations. What is doing the philosophical work in the quoted definition of composite individuals is not the relation of communication of motion per se, but rather the fact that communication of motion is the fundamental causal relation in extension, so that all extended composites can ultimately be described in terms of the communication of motions. These observations about extended composites, combined with Spinoza's other principles, lead us to a fully general account of composition. Spinoza holds two relevant metaphysical principles. The first is what I will call the principle of irreducibility,
Garrett (1994) and Lin (2005) take it as given that Spinoza's account of the composition of bodies will have a direct analogue in the composition of minds, Melamed is more cautious: he only commits to the claim that "it is at least possible that Spinozas notion of an individual applies to modes of other attributes as well" (Melamed, 2010, 87). While I do not think that caution is ultimately warranted, it is worthwhile to develop a detailed case for reading the definition of individuals as indicating an attribute-neutral account of composition. 15See Lemma 1 after IIpl3s: "Bodies are distinguished from one another by reason of motion and rest, speed and slowness, and not by reason of substance." In KV, Spinoza makes his view on the fundamentally of these properties very clear: "...we shall suppose as a thing proven, that there is no other mode in extension than motion and rest" (1/120 13-15). He seems to have retained this view throughout the writing of the Ethics.
14 Although

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that there can be no causal interaction between different attributes. The second is a consequence of what is commonly called Spinoza's principle of parallelism, that for each causal interaction that occurs within any one of the attributes, there is an analogous causal interaction that occurs within the others. The first principle, that the different attributes of substance (viz. thought, extension, and whatever else there is that humans don't know about) cannot causally interact with one another, is one of the most central premises in Spinoza's theory of mind. The principle is best exemplified in Spinoza's claim that "The body cannot determine the mind to thinking, and the mind cannot determine the body to motion, to rest, or to anything else (if there is anything else)" (2?IIIp2; cf. ElplO). Spinoza's argument for this proposition appeals simply to the fact that a mind is a mode of the attribute of thought while a body is a mode of the attribute of extension, and that they therefore cannot explain one another. Since for Spinoza a causal relation implies a conceptual and ultimately explanatory relation, he is forced to conclude that there can be no causal relations between modes of different attributes.16 Each attribute contains a particular kind of thing, and things of that kind causally interact with one another but never interact with things in different attributes. Were the composition of extended individuals ultimately to be accounted for in terms of extended causal relations, Spinoza could not have a single account of composition for "things", broadly speaking. Each attribute involves a different sort of
the connection between causal and explanatory or conceptual relations, see ElaA: "The knowledge [cognitio] of an effect depends on, and involves, the knowledge of its cause." There are a number of different readings of this axiom available. According to some commentators, the axiom should be understood to apply without restriction, and transitively: In order to have any knowledge of any particular thing, we need to have knowledge about its causes, and the causes of those causes, and so on ad infinitum; the most influential statement of this view, at present, is (Wilson, 1999). According to other commentators, the axiom should be understood as restricted in some way, either to certain types of knowledge or certain types of causes; see Morrison (MS). My reconstruction of Spinoza's argument against causal interaction between modes of different attributes here assumes a reading, like Wilson's, on which the axiom is unrestricted.
16For

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fundamental causal relation (e.g., the communication of motions causally relates objects in extension but not in thought), so each attribute demands a distinct account of composition. It follows as a consequence of the principle of irreducibility that BODIES cannot explain the composition of ideas. However, though Spinoza's discussion of composition seems to be about what it takes to compose a certain kind of thing, that's not all there is to it. The principle of parallelism assures us that the objects in one attribute bear the same "order and connection" as the objects in any other (2IIp7). One consequence of this is that for each occurrence of a causal relation in one attribute there is an analogous occurrence of a causal relation in each other attribute.17 So in spite of the fact that each attribute demands a conceptually distinct account of composition, each such account will be structurally analogous to all the others. Whatever his account of the composition of bodies, Spinoza must have a parallel account of the composition of minds. (In fact, that's why he works out the account of composite bodies to begin with: he wants to use it to elucidate his reasoning about minds.)18 That is, although Spinoza only explicitly addresses the composition of a certain kind of thing (bodies), his reasoning in that restricted domain is meant to follow from a general, attribute-neutral account of composition: What is true of composite bodies applies likewise to composite things in any other attribute, given that the appropriate causal relation is substituted in for "communication of motions".19 The best way to get this result is simply to
Delia Rocca (1996a, 18-29). MIpl3s and the propositions immediately following the physical digression, MIpl4-19. 19Indeed, on a prominent reading of Spinoza espoused by Michael Delia Rocca, each body is numerically identical with a mindthey are literally "one and the same thing, but expressed in two ways" (MIp7s); see Delia Rocca (1996a, Ch. 7). If this is so, then the isomorphism between minds and bodies simply entails that for any material composite, there exists a corresponding ideal composite. Although the fact that there is a material composite cannot explain the ideal composite the state of a mental thing cannot be explained in terms of the state of a material oneit does ensure that there must be an account of ideal composition, and that the account must generate exactly the same number of ideal things as material things.
18See 17See

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assume that composition (in general) is to be explained in terms of patterns of causal connections (in general), and that for every causal connection between any two objects in one attribute, there is an analogous causal connection between the corresponding objects in any other attribute. Then the account of material composition can be understood as a particular instance of a fully general, attribute-neutral account of composition. An acceptable generalization of BODIES is easily generated simply by quantifying over things rather than bodies, and causal relations instead of communication of motion. This gives us the principle I stated earlier:

COMPOSITION: Some things compose an individual if and only if they instantiate a pattern of causal relations.

The proposed account is general in that it does not require us to consider only physical objects and physical causation; it also takes into consideration mental objects and mental causation, thereby countenancing mental composites. This is a strength of the interpretation. Spinoza clearly intended his discussion of composition to apply (albeit indirectly) to mental composites as well as extended ones. Shortly after developing his definition of composite individuals, he uses it to argue that "...the human mind is not simple, but composed of a great many ideas" (Ethics IIpl5). So it is that Spinoza's discussion of composite bodies can be taken as the foundation for a fully general account of composition. The composition of several things within any given attribute is a matter of the composing things exemplifying a certain pattern of causal relations, analogous to "the communication of motions in a certain fixed manner". The possibility of the composition of several modes from different attributes is simply rejected, in accordance with the principle of irreducibility. Since

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no causal relations can hold between an idea and a body, there can be no complex individual that has, as parts, an idea and a body. Furthermore, since Spinoza takes the human mind itself to be a complex idea, there are no individuals composed of mind and body. So a human being, on this account, cannot be an individual composed of a mind and a body, for the mind and body are causally independent. Rather, as Spinoza recognizes, the mind and body of a human being must be related in some other, noncausal waythey are "one and the same thing, but expressed in two ways" (2?IIp7s), and the mind is "merely conceptually distinguished" from the body (TVp8dem). 2.2 Consequences & Further Questions According to the account as I've presented it so far, most of the composite things that one might expect to exist, do exist. You and I exist, as do each of the sundry organs that compose our bodies. I am sitting on a chair, not merely on particles arranged chairwise, for those particles instantiate a certain pattern of causal relations. The planet's surface and its atmosphere jointly satisfy the account as well: certain changes in the atmosphere cause certain changes to the planet's surface temperature, and certain changes in the planet's motions cause certain drastic changes to the atmosphere. The flip side of the coin is that lots of things are excluded. The oldest living tree, a 9,550 year old conifer growing in Sweden, is an individual. I am also an individual. But there seems to be no individual composed solely of that ancient tree and me. That we have some things in common, Spinoza would admit; we are both extended, we both live on the same planet, and so on. Spinoza must even, I think, grant that we stand in some particularly distant or weak causal relations to one another. But it is not the right sort of causal relationship for us to compose an individualit is not a pattern. If that tree were uprooted today, I would continue the writing of this book

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unabated; and if I were hit by a bus today, the tree would surely continue to turn water and carbon dioxide into food. Since each of us is in this sense independent of the other, this is good evidence that we do not stand in a pattern of causal relations, and hence that we do not compose an individual.20 These are, I think, fairly sensible results of Spinoza's definition. I am inclined to say that there is no individual composed solely of the oldest living tree and me, and Spinoza's requirement (that an individual's parts communicate their motions according to a fixed pattern) seems to capture the reason that I am so inclined. Having sketched (but not yet filled out) this basic picture, we can ask two important questions about the relationship between part and whole. First, does a whole depend upon its parts? Second, is a whole identical with its parts? Does the whole depend upon its parts? Spinoza's account of composition, for all its unique qualities, seems also to line up with several standard features of our everyday understanding of composite material things. For instance, since the identity of a composite individual is determined by a certain pattern of causal relations, and the causal relations depend upon the parts which exemplify them, it seems that the composite individual depends upon its parts. It also seems that the individual is divisible into those several parts; we can pinpoint the role each part plays in the composition of the whole. Although these conclusions are comfortably familiar in our reasoning about parthood, they raise an important problem in the context of Spinoza's metaphysics. How can composite individuals be divisible and depend upon their parts, given that Spinoza takes substance itself
is more to be said about why we do not compose an individual. In the next chapter, I will argue that composition grants some jointly-held causal power to the component parts involved. Anticipating this development, I say that the reason the tree and I don't compose anything is that we don't, in virtue of our causal relations with one another, jointly gain some further power. Because of this, there is no reason, intuitively, to conceive of us as composing one whole.
20There

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to be indivisible and without parts? Fortunately, this question turns out to be one that Spinoza considered important enough to answer. Quite simply, his answer is that substance is not composed of its attributes or modes (Ipl5s). Substance is mereologically atomic.21 Still, Spinoza's monism may seem to sit uneasily next to his claim that modes of substance sometimes compose other modes. If substance is extended, and extended things have parts, then why doesn't substance have parts? Spinoza saw this oddity and dealt with it head on in his "Letter on the Infinite":
So it is nonsense, bordering on madness, to hold that extended Substance is composed of parts or bodies really distinct from one another. ...However, if you ask why we have such a strong natural tendency to divide extended Substance, I answer that we conceive quantity in two ways: abstractly or superficially, as we have it in the imagination with the help of the senses, or as Substance, apprehended solely by means of the intellect. So if we have regard to quantity as it exists in the imagination (and this is what we most frequently and readily do), it will be found to be divisible, finite, composed of parts, and manifold. But if we have regard to it as it is in the intellect and we apprehend the thing as it is in itself (and this is very difficult), then it is found to be infinite, indivisible, and one alone, as I have already sufficiently proved (Ep. 12).

Spinoza is at pains in this passage to distinguish between two ways of thinking about extension (what he here calls "quantity"). If we conceive of extension in terms of our experience of it, we are presented with a bunch of distinct impressions (to use Hume's term) of individual extended things. We can imagine these things separated from their surroundings, divided into parts, and so on. This imaginative process
Spinoza scholars have remarked in conversation that Spinoza seems sometimes to commit himself to saying that the power of finite individuals is part of the infinite power of the one substance. However, I have been unable to find any passage in which Spinoza makes precisely this claim. SIIpl lc comes close: "the human mind is part of the infinite intellect of God." TVp2 suggests a similar claim: "we are a part of Nature," where 'Nature' is taken as a name for the one substance. Both of these passages admit of perfectly viable readings on which they only commit Spinoza to the claim that we (our minds, our bodies) are parts of infinite modes of substance. But this is very different than the claim that substance itself has parts, a claim that Spinoza disavows: "No substance, insofar as it is a substance, is divisible [into parts]" (Ipl3c).
21 Some

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leads us to conceive of extension in general as being divisible into parts and as dependent upon those parts. Someone like Hume might here argue from conceivability to possibility, but even the possibility of extended substance depending upon its parts would contradict Spinoza's view. Spinoza takes this line of reasoning as modus tollens rather than ponens, however. It is a sheer metaphysical impossibility for substance to depend upon its modes, so we ought to condemn the way of conceiving (i.e., via the imagination) that would lead us to believe such things. The intellect, by contrast, conceives of extension as an attribute of substance, and from this infers a number of its most crucial essential propertiesespecially the properties of being indivisible and independent of any parts, which it inherits from substance. As the quoted passage indicates, Spinoza takes this intellectual approach to understanding extension to be the correct one. The problem, recall, was to explain the apparent bifurcation in his theory between the indivisibility and independence of substance, on the one hand, and the divisibility and dependence of extension upon parts, on the other hand. The reply seems to be that when substance and its attributes are rightly conceived, there is no bifurcation. Extension seems to be, but is not, divisible into and dependent upon parts. Though this seems odd, a passage from the Ethics confirms that it is really Spinoza's view:
...if we attend to quantity as it is in the imagination...it will be found to be finite, divisible, and composed of parts; but if we attend to it as it is in the intellect, and conceive it insofar as it is a substance...it will be found to be infinite, unique, and indivisible. This will be sufficiently plain to everyone who knows how to distinguish between the intellect and the imaginationparticularly if it is also noted that matter is everywhere the same, and that parts are distinguished in it only insofar as we conceive matter to be affected in different ways, so that its parts are distinguished only modally, but not really. (Ipl5s)

The imagination misleads us into thinking of extended substance (what Spinoza again calls 'quantity') as having parts, but whenever we take ourselves to be distinguishing

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parts of extended substance, we are merely distinguishing parts of various modes of extended substance. When we slice a loaf of bread into parts, we are not slicing extended substance into partsextended substance is just as much in the part as it was in the whole, and the act of slicing the bread (operating as it did within the natural laws governing extension) did not alter the extended substance. Similarly, though the loaf of bread depends upon its parts, this does not entail that extended substance is subject to an analogous dependence. What about the modes of extensionare they divisible and dependent upon their parts? It might seem that Spinoza thinks that although particular extended things are divisible into parts, they do not depend upon those parts. In his discussion of the physics of individuals, Spinoza seems to consider the possibility of composing an "infinite individual" out of all finite bodies:
So far we have conceived an individual which is composed only of bodies which are distinguished from one another only by motion and rest, speed and slowness, that is, which is composed of the simplest bodies. But if we should now conceive of another, composed of a number of individuals of a different nature, we shall find that it can be affected in a great many other ways, and still preserve its nature. ...[and] if we should further conceive of a third kind of individual, composed of this second kind, we shall find that it can be affected in many other ways, without any change of its form. And if we proceed in this way to infinity, we shall easily conceive that the whole of nature is one individual, whose parts, that is, all bodies, vary in infinite ways, without any change of the whole individual (TIpl3s, Lemma 7s).

Spinoza is picturing something like this. At bottom, there are bodies individuated simply by their bearing some particular quantity of one of the fundamental qualities of extension, call them 'motion' and 'rest'. A simple body only has one individuating feature, its quantity of motion or rest, and if this quantity changes, the simple body is destroyed. However, these simple bodies interact in ways such that they come to compose more complicated bodies, and more complicated bodies are individuated by

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more complicated properties. And because they are individuated by more complicated properties, the more complicated bodies may undergo a wider variety of change while still maintaining their identity. These two levels of body are related to one another in something like the way individual cells are related to complex living organisms: a cell's identity is determined by its properties, but the identity of a complex organism that contains the cell as a part may be determined by an entirely different set of properties. If we continue iterating composition in this wayand continue moving to ever more complicated bodies individuated by ever more complicated propertieswe will eventually arrive (Spinoza asserts) at a unique, all-encompassing individual, the whole of nature. The problem with the construction of the whole of nature as the mereological sum of all bodies is that it seems to contradict Spinoza's other claims about extension that is, the extended substancebeing indivisible and independent of any parts. If we take the whole of nature to be a mediate infinite mode of extension, as Spinoza suggests we should (Ep. 64), then it needs to have the substance-like feature of necessary existence. It inherits this feature from the extended substance (i?Ip21-23). Yet Spinoza's discussion of the "infinite individual" suggests that we can understand the (mediate) infinite mode of extension as being composed from parts, those parts in turn composed from simpler parts, and so on down the line. It is hard to see how each level could really be composed from parts without being dependent upon those parts. And, more to the point, it is hard to see how the whole of nature can be necessary if it depends upon things that aren't necessary. I think, though, that this is not what Spinoza intends to convey in L7s, nor is he there contradicting his claims about the unity of nature. The important part of the quoted passage is the claim that each individual at each level of composition has the capacity to be subject to, and to persist through, a wider variety of changes than

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the level below. Spinoza includes this passage as a way of explaining how the whole of nature can be changeless in spite of the change among its parts. Furthermore, it is important to recognize that the discussion of individuals is contained in the larger context of a discussion about the relationship between mind and body. Given Spinoza's parallelism thesis as well as the context of the quoted lemma, it is apparent that his account of the composition of the whole of nature from finite bodies is also meant to provide a physical analogy for the way the infinite intellect contains our finite minds, which is otherwise a very unintuitive claim. So although Spinoza clearly does maintain that extended substance is neither divisible into nor dependent upon parts, there is good textual evidence that he does not take the same stance with regard to modes of extension. Indeed, there is a passage in the Short Treatise that explicitly contradicts that claim. He asserts,
A thing composed of different parts must be such that each singular part can be conceived and understood without the others. For example, in a clock that is composed of many different wheels, cords, etc., I say that each wheel, cord, etc., can be understood separately, without needing [the understanding of] the whole as a whole. ... Each part of it can be conceived and understood, and can exist, without the whole. (KV 11.19)

Here Spinoza states quite clearly that the parts of a composite individual do not depend upon the whole. Rather, each part may be "conceived and understood" independently of the other parts. Hence in spite of the possible argument from Spinoza's conception of causationwhat Curley (1969, 23) calls the "flower-in-the-cranniedwall" motif, popular in idealist interpretations of Spinozathere is no good reason to think that Spinoza takes wholes to be prior to their paxts. Is the whole identical with its parts? This leaves us with the problem regarding the infinite extended individual, though. How could such a whole depend upon its parts and be necessary, given that its parts

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(particular finite bodies) are not necessary? One way this could happen is if the whole depends upon the causal roles of its parts, but is insensitive to what plays those roles. Then, if it were necessary that there always exist things performing those causal roles, there could be a necessarily existent individual (like the infinite mode of extension) that has, and depends upon, contingent parts. Intriguingly, this blocks one common answer to the general composition question. If this account of the dependence of the infinite mediate mode of extension upon finite modes of extension is correct, then composite individuals cannot in general be identical with their parts. Why? The infinite mediate mode of extension has a property that the parts do not have, namely the property of necessary existence. Many recent philosophers have argued that complex individuals are identical with, are nothing more than, their parts.22 On my reading, Spinoza cannot accept this answer to the general composition question. What does he say instead? Spinoza seems to go in exactly the opposite direction: individuals are identical with, are nothing more than, the organization of their parts. That is, Spinoza believes that an individual is identical with the pattern of causal relations among its component parts. This view is strange, but attributing it to Spinoza affords us a useful explanation of a puzzling feature of the text, and it affords Spinoza a way of avoiding certain problems that plague many-one identity. The textual evidence in favor of the view is subtle; since Spinoza does not tell us whether a whole is identical with its parts, so we are left to infer an answer from the assumptions he makes in his arguments about composite individuals. To that end, I propose that the identification of an individual with its pattern is the best way to explain two features of the text. First, it opens up space for a necessary thing
(1988) provides one plausible way in which composition might be (a species of) identity. Cf. Scaltsas (1990) for a discussion of recent (and ancient) versions of the view that a whole is identical with its parts.
22Baxter

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to depend upon contingent ones, as Spinoza seems to demand. Second, it explains the way in which Spinoza uses his account of composition to develop his account of persistence. In the lemmas after the definition of composite individuals, Spinoza spins that definition into an account of persistence through various kinds of change.
If...of an individual which is composed of a number of bodies, some are removed, and at the same time as many others of the same nature take their place, the individual will retain its nature, as before, without any change of its form. (IIpl3s L4) If the parts composing an individual become greater or less, but in such a proportion that they all keep the same pattern of motion and rest to each other as before, then the individual will likewise retain its nature, as before, without any change of form, (ibid, L5) If certain bodies composing an individual are compelled to alter the motion they have from one direction to another; but so that they can continue their motions and communicate them to each other in the same pattern as before, the individual will likewise retain its nature, without any change of form, (ibid, L6) Furthermore, the individual so composed retains its nature, whether it, as a whole, moves or is at rest, or whether it moves in this or that direction, so long as each part retains its motion, and communicates it, as before, to the others. (ibid, L7)

In each case, what Spinoza argues is that since the change in question does not result in a difference in the individual's pattern of causal relations, it follows that the individual persists through the change.23 Now, there is one very straightforward reason that Spinoza would think he was warranted in taking the preservation of an individual's pattern to imply the persistence of that individualnamely, if the pattern and the individual are identical.
rather odd phrase "retains its nature" is just intended to refer to persistence. Spinoza thinks that the only way an individual can be destroyed is if its parts no longer "retain" or express its essence. The point, then, is to explain why certain changes to tin individual do not result in its destruction while others do so result, i.e., to explain why an individual persists through some changes but not others.
23The

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While there axe other reasons that one might use to justify that inference, all of them would be much more complicated than the reasoning Spinoza gives in his demonstrations of the foregoing lemmas. In the demonstration of lemma 4 (to which the others all simply refer back) Spinoza takes the brunt of the work to be showing that the kind of change in question preserves the overall pattern of causal relations. Once he has shown this, he immediately infers that individuals persist through such a change. There is no textual evidence for any more complex relationship between the individual and its pattern of causal relations. He takes them to be identical. Reading Spinoza in this way allows him to avoid the problems that attend manyone identity. If a whole were identical with its parts, then at least two sorts of problems arise. First, counting problems are generated by the fact that there are many parts and only one whole. The parts have the property of being many, while the whole presumably lacks that property: if being many entails not being one, and the whole is one, then the whole is not many. But if the whole is identical with its parts, then the whole must be many.24 Second, and perhaps more importantly for Spinoza, problems about persistence are generated by the fact that the whole may survive the loss or replacement of some parts. The parts taken together are something like a Lockean "mass of matter" in that the removal or replacement of any one of them results in a different collection of parts. The whole, however, often seems capable of surviving such changes. If the whole is identical with its parts at two different moments, then the symmetry and transitivity of identity entails that its parts are identical at those two different moments. But if its parts are different at those two moments, then two different collections of parts are identical.25
Baxter (1988). is: Suppose x = y at t\ and x = z at 2- Then y = z; but our hypothesis was that y = z. There are, of course, numerous ways around this problem. I mean only to highlight the way I think Spinoza has avoided it.
25That 24See

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By taking an individual to be identical not with the parts themselves, but with a pattern of causal relations instantiated by those parts, these two sorts of problems vanish. The parts are many, but the whole is onethe pattern. And although the parts taken together depend for their existence upon each particular part taken separately, the whole does not. The pattern depends for its existence upon some parts standing in certain causal relations, but it does not depend upon the identity of those parts. They can be replaced, or possibly even removed. The problem with patterns I have given historical and textual arguments to the effect that Spinoza advocated the account of material composition outlined above (BODIES). I have also argued that Spinoza is also committed to a generalized (attribute-neutral) version of the account, COMPOSITION, and that this constitutes a viable answer to the special composition question. Based on COMPOSITION, I then argued that Spinoza has two further commitments regarding the composition relation. First, I argued that he is committed to the claim that parts are prior to their wholes. Second, I argued that he takes composition not to be an identity relation between a whole and its parts, but rather to be an identity relation between a whole and the pattern of causal relations instantiated by its parts. In a slogan, he rejects composition as identity in favor of composition as instantiation. My focus in this chapter has been on the relation of communication of motion, since this relation is a crucial part of Spinoza's definition of composite individuals. But my approach has been to explain the "certain specific pattern" of communicated motions in terms of some sort of ongoing causal connection. The problem is that it isn't entirely clear under what conditions several things bear an ongoing connection. Must the connection be unending? Hopefully not, else the account will cleaxly be too

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strong. It should nonetheless be cleax at the outset what groups of bodies Spinoza means to exclude from his definition of composite individuals. Suppose (to the contrary) that composition required simply that the composing bodies bear any sort of causal connection to one another. Then there would be countless momentary individuals generated and, a moment later, destroyed as bodies bumped into one another and then went their separate ways. Two humans shaking hands, for instance, are momentarily communicating their motions to one another. Is there a third individual that the two humans compose for the duration of their handshake? Spinoza does not think so. The reason such cases are ruled out, on Spinoza's account, is this: although the bodies in question bear a momentary causal relation, they do not do so normally, according to an ongoing pattern. But how can we make sense of the notion of an ongoing pattern? It seems at first to be a relative matter. The pattern of causal relations binding a statue's parts, though it appears fixed to us, will degrade over the centuries; by contrast, though it may change almost instantaneously from our perspective, the pattern of causal relations binding the components of an atom nonetheless seems like it ought to fit the bill. There are two obvious conceptions of an ongoing pattern that do not fall prey to such worries about relativity. We might take it to be trivialthat is, we might take it to impose no additional constraint at all. Alternatively, we might take it to be total, that is, as the requirement that the pattern of causal relations is perpetual. Neither option satisfies: the requirement that the causal connection be ongoing must add something to the account, or else the account seems far too weak; yet 'ongoing' cannot simply mean 'eternal', or else the account seems far too strict. We need to find a middle ground, a reading of the account that allows us to exclude the composition of two people shaking hands but includes the composition of finite things. I take up this challenge in the next chapter.

Chapter 3

Patterns and Powers

Introduction Spinoza's definition of individuals at Ethics IIpl3s provides the basic framework for a moderate account of composition, an account on which several distinct things compose something if and only if those things are bound in a pattern of causal relations. I argued in the previous chapter that we should understand Spinoza to be advocating the following thesis:
COMPOSITION:

Some things compose an individual if and only if they instantiate a

pattern of causal relations. For Spinoza, causal relations among a thing's parts provide the metaphysical glue that accounts for their unity. But not just any collections of causal relations suffice: Spinoza demands that the causal relations be instantiated in a ratio or (as I argued) pattern. There axe a number of prominent commentators today who accept the translation of 'ratao' as 'pattern' instead of the English 'ratio', but few who are willing to spell out what precisely this means; indeed, most commentators seem to assume that Spinoza is making a facile appeal to the conception of a pattern that we might use when speaking of (vague, merely apparent) patterns of clouds in the sky. As I see it, Spinoza's conception of a pattern is at once richer and clearer than that. In this chapter, I will elaborate upon what it means to instantiate "a pattern of causal relations" by appealing to his understanding of the way an individual's causal powers relate to its pattern.

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I'll begin by arguing that Spinoza takes several things to instantiate a pattern of causal relations just in case those things instantiate some causal relations, and those relations ground some further causal power. After presenting my initial argument for this reading, I will discuss two ways in which my proposal fits nicely with views which Spinoza expresses elsewhere in the Ethics, and which seem on the face of it to have very little to do with composition. In particular, I will consider elements of his philosophy of mind and his conatus doctrine. My primary aim in these sections is to draw out certain aspects of Spinoza's metaphysics that corroborate my reading; however, I will also attempt to clarify his views in light of the account of composition I think he held.

3.1

A PowersBased Account of Patterns of Causal Relations

The operative intuition behind COMPOSITION is that what it is for some things to compose an individual is for them to exhibit causal unity relative to a given attribute. For instance, in the case of material composition, Spinoza takes the relevant sort of causal unity to be that exhibited by some bodies when they instantiate a pattern of communicated motion. But what counts as a pattern? I claim that, on Spinoza's view, a pattern is a set of causal relations which, when instantiated, grounds some causal power. Specifically, Spinoza holds:

PATTERN: Some things instantiate a pattern of carnal relations if and only if (i) they instantiate some causal relations and (ii) those causal relations ground some causal power.1
'To be precise, I am assuming that some things, the xs, instantiate some causal relations, the Rs, iff (1) each of the Rs is instantiated by some of the xs, resulting in some relation-instances, call them the RiS; (2) none of the Ris has any relata except for the xs; and (3) each of the xs is a relatum for at least one of the Rts.

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PATTERN has it that this is both a necessary and a sufficient condition on the instantiation of a pattern of causal relations, and so my argument must have two parts. I will argue first for necessity, then for sufficiency. I will proceed through these arguments rather schematically, without relying upon examples other than those Spinoza himself uses. I will then show how PATTERN combines with COMPOSITION to resolve the apparent tension between Spinoza's technical notions of composite individuals and singular things [res singulares].

3.1.1

The Case for Necessity

The first part of the argument must establish that, whenever some things instantiate a pattern of causal relations, (i) they instantiate some causal relations and (ii) those causal relations ground some further causal power. So, assume that some things instantiate a pattern of causal relations. I think it obvious that (i) follows; it is hard to see how, say, several bodies could stand in a pattern of communicated motions without communicating any motions to one another. To establish that (ii) also follows from our hypothesis, notice first that there is a relevant logical connection between composition and existence. When several things compose an individual, it follows that the individual exists. Any necessary conditions on existence will therefore be necessary conditions on composition. Spinoza's metaphysical system involves one central necessary condition on existence: every actually existing thing has some causal power. This thesis features implicitly as early as i?Iplldem in Spinoza's third proof of God's existence: "To be able not to exist is to lack power, and conversely, to be able to exist is to have power" (my emphasis). Similarly, at Ip36, Spinoza argues that "Nothing exists from whose nature some effect does not follow," which can be paraphrased as the claim that everything that

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exists has some causal power.2 So, given the logical connection between composition and existence, it follows that in order for several things to compose an individual, the resulting individual must have some causal power distinct from the power that its parts have on their own. Since we have seen that Spinoza takes the instantiation of a pattern of causal relations to be sufficient for composition, we have the following chain of inference: if some things instantiate a pattern of causal relations, then they compose an individual, and so their composite exists, and so their composite has some causal power. Therefore, if some things instantiate a pattern of causal relations, their composite has some causal power. The next step is to show that if the composite has a causal power, it must have this causal power in virtue of the causal relations among its parts. As far as I can see, there are two reasons Spinoza would have accepted this. The first reason is historical. Although Spinoza rejects some important elements of the Cartesian physical picture, he seems to accept the view that the macroscopic properties and powers of an extended thing are due to the structure of its microscopic parts.3 Descartes has it that "All the properties which we clearly perceive in [matter] are reducible to its divisibility and consequent mobility in respect of its parts" (CSM 232). This was not an uncommon view, of course; one finds it in most of those working on physics during that period. In spite of the numerous differences between Descartes, Hobbes, Newton, and so many other early moderns interested in science, they all seem to agree that the properties and powers of a complex physical thing can be explained in terms of the
(at least material) equivalence between existence and causal power is also emphasized at JSIId7, a passage to which I will return later. 3The primary textual evidence that Spinoza held this view is simply the lemmata listed after the definition of individuals in the Physical Digression. There, Spinoza gives a reductive explanation of the power of a composite body to persist through various changes, in terms of the causal relations among its parts. The circumstantial evidence that Spinoza held such a view is mountainous; it is a view we may safely attribute to most of Spinoza's strongest philosophical influences. Cf. Bennett (1984, 108-110); what I say here is compatible with Bennett's reading, pending translation of "x is a part of yn into 'field-metaphysical' terms.
2The

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(physical) causal relations among its parts. Spinoza is no exception.4 If Spinoza accepted this view, then given his principle of parallelism, it would follow that all of the (attribute-specific) properties of any complex mode are due to the causal relations among its parts. The logic is straightforward. Suppose that all bodies have whatever physical properties they have in virtue of the causal relations among their parts. Given the existence of a body and the fact that it instantiates a property, it follows from parallelism that there exists an idea that, in virtue of its parts, instantiates some mental property. So not just bodies, but ideas must bear their properties in virtue of the causal relations among their parts. The second reason Spinoza might hold this view is more speculative, but more philosophically interesting. It draws out the significance of his frequent use of otherwise obscure geometrical examples. The reason is this: Spinoza sees an analogy between the necessary properties of mathematical and geometrical figures, on the one hand, and the causal powers of actually existing things, on the other hand. Just as the properties of a geometrical figure follow necessarily from its nature, so the causal powers of an actually existing thing follow necessarily from its nature.5 And just as
I do not mean to be taking a stand on whether or not Descartes (or Hobbes, for that matter) accepted a dynamic conception of bodies. Descartes definitely believes that all of a body's powers and properties are the result of the "shape, size, and motion of [the] particles of matter" that compose it (CSM 279). However, it becomes clear when one looks at his proposed explanations that the reason Descartes takes the shape, size, and motion of a body's parts to be important is that these properties condition the ways in which each part causally interacts with the others. A work that Spinoza could not have read, but that represents the same line of thought, is Newton (2004): Now the smallest particles of matter may cohere by the strongest attractions, and compose bigger particles of weaker virtue; and many of these may cohere and compose bigger particles whose virtue is still weaker, and so on for diverse successions, until the progression end in the biggest particles on which the operations in chymistry, and the colours of natural bodies, depend and which by cohereing compose bodies of a sensible magnitude. (Queries to the Opticks, Query 31, 133) Both Descartes and Newton hold that the properties of bodies are due to the causal interactions among their parts. My claim is that Spinoza holds this view as well. 5Viljanen (2008b, 2011) has drawn out the textual and historical evidence that Spinoza endorses this analogy, primarily focusing upon the immanent causal power by which substance causes its modes. What I say in the following paragraphs is an attempt to develop the analogy for the causal
4Again,

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the nature of a geometrical figure is to be constructed from other figures in a certain way, so the nature of a composite individual is to be constructed from other composite individuals in a certain way. There is textual evidence for this reading in several passages from the Ethics.6 It is clear that Spinoza thinks that the properties of a geometrical figure follow necessarily from its nature. Indeed, he uses the relationship between a geometrical figure and its properties as a way of explaining the relationship between God and the world:
...from God's supreme power, or infinite nature, infinitely many things in infinitely many ways [modis], i.e., all things, have necessarily flowed, or always follow, by the same necessity and in the same way as from the nature of a triangle it follows, from eternity and to eternity, that its three angles are equal to two right angles. (E Ipl7s, emph. added)7

The comparison is this: given the definition (or "nature", as Spinoza sometimes says) of a triangle, it must be true that the sum of the angles of a triangle are equal to the sum of two right angles. Likewise, given the definition of God (or God's "infinite nature"), it must follow that, say, it is raining at some particular time and place, or that this mind has this idea of the rain.
8

powers of finite modes as well. I should note that one controversial element of Viljanen's thesis, at least in his earlier commentary, is that Spinoza takes substance to be a formal or emanative cause of its modes, and is their efficient cause in virtue of being their formal cause. Laerke (2011, 455-456, fn. 61; cf. 457-458) has cast some doubt on this this claim, noting that Spinoza does not seem to have been nearly so influenced by medieval metaphysics as Viljanen's argument suggests. I think Laerke is probably right, but my argument here does not rely upon such claims about formal or emanative causation. 6I will focus primarily upon the evidence in the Ethics because it is definitive in a way the earlier works are not. Except for the Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza either did not publish or expressly disavowed all of his early works. Moreover, these early works often express views that are directly contrary to the views Spinoza expresses in the Ethics. For example, compare the discussion of the difference between ideas and their objects in the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (11/14 13-20) to the discussion of the same topic in the Ethics (IIp7s and IIp21s). 7I have modified Curley's translation because I think the passage is best read as invoking the non-technical sense of'modis'. 8Nor is this a view that Spinoza came to late in his life. In the Second Dialogue in KV, Theophilus (Spinoza's mouthpiece) claims that ...an idea I have of a triangle and another [idea], arising from the extension of one of

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But in the same breath as Spinoza claims that all things must follow from God's nature (Ipl6), he also claims that "from, this it follows that God is the efficient cause of all things..." (Tpl6cl, emph. added). This is an odd move, for as we have just seen, Spinoza takes the analogy between God's nature and the definition of a triangle very seriously. Yet we do not commonly think that there is a causal relationship between a triangle's definition and its property of being such that its angles add up to two right angles. Nonetheless, there axe two further passages that strongly suggest that this is Spinoza's view. One such passage is found later in 'Ipl7s, where Spinoza lambasts those who mistakenly think that God could bring it about that things happen otherwise than they actually do. Such people, on Spinoza's view, are asserting an absurdity:
But this is the same as if they were to say that God can bring it about that it would not follow from the nature of a triangle that its three angles are equal to two right angles; or [sive] that from a given cause the effect would not follow,

which is absurd. (Ipl7s) Although the text is not clear on this point, I think the context of these passages suggests that we should take the disjunction between these two examples not as contrastive, but as explicative. That is, what is absurd about the possibility that the triangle's nature might not imply that its angles sum to two right angles just is that this possibility would require that from a given cause, no effect would follow. Why? Because a triangle's nature causes it to be the case that the angles of the figure are equal to two right angles. This might seem like a stretch, but note that Spinoza
the angles. The angle formed by this extension is necessarily equal to the two opposite internal angles, etc. I say that these [ideas] have produces a new idea, viz. that the three angles of the triangle are equal to two right angles. This idea is so united to the first, that it can neither be nor be conceived without it. (1/32 11-17) The idea "that the three angles of the triangle are equal to two right angles" is one that "can neither be nor be conceived" without the idea of the triangle. What stands out about Spinoza's claim here is that it is phrased in just the same way that, in the Ethics, he describes the dependence of all things on God.

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has actually set down as an axiom that "Prom a given determinate cause an effect necessarily follows" (2?Ia3). He has no similar axiom in place to establish directly the absurdity of the claim about the triangle. But if the claim about the triangle is an instance of the claim that a cause could produce no effect, as I am suggesting, then he needs no further axioms to handle the claim about the trianglethis one covers all of the relevant cases. Another passage that pushes us to read Spinoza in this way is his second proof of God's existence (Mplldem). Spinoza there introduces a version of the principle of sufficient reason, according to which "Each thing must be assigned a cause or reason [causa seu ratio], either for its existence or its nonexistence." He then distinguishes two cases: a thing's "cause or reason" for its existence (or nonexistence) must either be contained in its nature, or external to its nature. As an example of the first case, Spinoza considers a square circle: "the reason why a square circle does not exist, is indicated [indicat] in its very nature; namely, that it involves a contradiction." Spinoza here takes 'cause' and 'reason' to be in some way interchangeable terms, since he uses the clearly explicative construction "causa seu ratio". If something is the cause of some effect, it is the reason for that effect's existence; and if something is the reason for another thing's existence, it must be the cause of that other thing. Given this fact, it might not be so strange to attribute to Spinoza the view that the nature of a triangle causes the triangle's propertiesthis would only be to say that the triangle's nature is the reason it has those properties. If I am right, then Spinoza is thinking of composite individuals on the same model as he is thinking of geometrical figures in the foregoing passages. A cause and its effect are related by a necessary connection similar to that by which a geometrical figure and its properties are relatedindeed, on one available reading of the foregoing passages, a geometrical figure and its properties are causally related. This tells us something

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important about the way that the causal powers of composite individuals must be related to the parts of those individuals. Remember that we are trying to show that, for Spinoza, if a composite has a causal power, this carnal power must be grounded in the causal relations among its parts. One way of seeing why Spinoza holds this view, I said, was to look at the analogy between geometrical figures and composite individuals. Now the analogyor at least the relevant aspect of the analogyshould be clear. Whatever grounds the properties of geometrical figures, an analogous feature of composite individuals must ground their causal powers. So, in virtue of what feature of a geometrical figure does it have its properties? The answer, discussed already, is simple: the nature of a geometrical figure grounds the properties of that figure, for the nature of a geometrical figure is to be constructed in a certain way.9 So its being constructed in a certain way is ultimately the reason that a geometrical figure has the properties that it does. Here, the analogy with composite individuals is straightforward. As with geometrical figures, composite individuals must be constructed in a certain way. They require certain parts to stand in certain causal relations to other parts, j list as a triangle must have as parts three line segments joined at their vertices in a certain way. And just as the relations among the lines of a triangle necessitate and explain the fact that its angles are equal to two right angles,
given that so many of Spinoza's examples are of geometrical figures, he says little about what he means by the nature or definition of such a figure. However, there is a useful passage on this topic in the TIE: 1. [...] the definition [of each thing] will have to include the proximate cause. E.g., according to this law, a circle would have to be defined as follows: it is the figure that is described by any line of which one end is fixed and the other movable. This definition clearly includes the proximate cause. 2. We require a concept, or definition, of the thing such that when it is considered alone, without any others conjoined, all the thing's properties can be deduced from it (as may be seen in this definition of the circle). (11/35 12-20) The idea, then, is that each geometrical figure, like the circle, is defined as being constructed in a certain way, and from this manner of construction, all of the figure's properties follow. See Allison (1987, 40-43) for a nice discussion of Spinoza's use of "genetic" definitions.
9Ironically,

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so too the causal relations among the parts of a composite body or mind necessitate and explain the ways in which it causally interacts with other bodies or minds. So the causal powers of the composite are grounded in the causal relations among its parts. We have established that if some things instantiate a pattern of causal relations, two facts obtain: they must instantiate some causal relations; and those relations must ground some further causal power. This secures (ii), completing the argument for the first half of PATTERN. In short, whether or not several things compose an individual depends crucially upon whether or not those things interact in ways that grant them joint possession of causal powers beyond what they singly possess. But PATTERN was a biconditional, and this only establishes one half of the claim. Let's move now to the second half. 3.1.2 The Case for Sufficiency

The second half of the argument requires showing that whenever several things instantiate some causal relations which ground some further causal power, it follows that those things instantiate a pattern of causal relations. To make my case here, I will use two steps. First, I will show that on Spinoza's view, to instantiate a pattern of causal relations is to have what he calls an actual essence. Then I will show that in order for several things to (i) instantiate some causal relations that (ii) ground some farther causal power, those things must jointly have an actual essence. The conclusion will be this: Several things causally interact so as to give rise to some additional causal power only if those things instantiate a pattern of causal relations. Spinoza first discusses actual essences as part of his doctrine of conatus or striving. After arguing that each thing strives to persevere in existing (Z?IIIp6), he claims that this "striving, by which each thing strives to persevere in its being, is nothing but

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the actual essence [actualem essentiam] of the thing" (2?IIIp7). The demonstration of this proposition clarifies the notion of an actual essence somewhat:
Prom the given essence of each thing some things necessarily follow (by Ip36), and things are able to do nothing but what follows necessarily from their determinate nature (by Ip29). So the power of each thing, or the striving by which it (either alone or with others) does anything or strives to do anythingthat is (by IIIp6), the power, or striving, by which it strives to persevere in its being, is nothing but the given, or actual, essence of the thing.

Among his several different glosses on the notion of an actual essence, Spinoza claims that the actual essence of a thing is the power by which it strives to "persevere in its being", its power to overcome destructive external forces and to survive various changesin other words, its power to persist. This is not the first time in the Ethics that Spinoza discusses persistence. He also discusses it in the Physical Digression, shortly after the definition of composite individuals. But those passages reveal that Spinoza takes the persistence of a composite thing to consist in the preservation of its pattern of causal relations. For example, to allow that an individual can survive some changes in the direction of motion of its parts, Spinoza argues:
If certain bodies composing an individual are compelled to alter the motion they have from one direction to another; but so that they can continue their motions and communicate them to each other in the same pattern as before, the individual will likewise retain its nature, without any change of [pattern]. (ibid, L6)10

In order for a composite individual to persist through such changes, it must "retain its nature", or pattern, across those changes. Spinoza thinks that composite individuals can do this. But, as we have seen, he also thinks that to have this power of persisting
10The text is more confusing than it needs to be for our purposes, so I have substituted 'pattern' for 'form' in the quoted lemma. This is licensed by the fact that Spinoza has earlier used 'form' explicitly to refer to the individual's pattern.

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is to have an actual essence. (In the demonstration of IIIp7 quoted above, he even goes so far as to say that the actual essence is identical with the power of persisting.) So, when several things instantiate a pattern of causal relations, they jointly have an actual essence. Next, I will argue that on Spinoza's view, whenever several things interact so as to ground some further causal power, those things must jointly have an actual essence. To see this, first recall one of the glosses on the notion of an actual essence that Spinoza gave in the demonstration of IIIp7: an actual essence is that by which a thing "does, or strives to do, anything" (emph. added). The actual essence of a thing just is its causal power. For other reasons, Spinoza thinks that this causal power must be directed in certain ways, such as being directed toward the preservation of the thing rather than its destruction.11 But this does not alter the content of Spinoza's claim in the quoted passage. Whenever several things jointly have some causal powerthat is, whenever they jointly "do, or strive to do, anything"it seems they must have an actual essence. But they do not each have this actual essence; otherwise they each could have produced the same effect on their own, without the assistance of the rest. So they must jointly have this actual essence. The argument, then, is this. To instantiate a pattern of causal relations is to have an actual essence. But whenever several things (i) instantiate some causal relations and (ii) those relations ground some further causal power, it follows that they jointly have an actual essence. So, if some things instantiate some causal relations that ground some further causal power, then those things instantiate a pattern of causal relations. And this was the second half of PATTERN. Having established that Spinoza is committed to PATTERN, let me mention some
11See

TIIp4-6. The argument behind these three propositions is contested ground; see Viljanen

(2008a).

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ways in which it interacts with COMPOSITION to restrict and clarify his account of composition. It is important that PATTERN requires that several things jointly have some further power in order to compose an individual, beyond what they have on their lonesome. Otherwise I would need to have the causal power to form carbon-carbon bonds in virtue of the carbon atoms composing my body having that causal power. PATTERN also serves to guarantee that composition is not arbitrary. It rules out, for example, the possibility that an arbitrary circle and an arbitrary square compose an individual simply because they jointly have the sum of the power of the circle and the power of the square. Although Spinoza is no emergentist, he only takes further powers to be relevant to compositionpowers besides squareness, circularity, or their sum, namely the powers that are generated by the causal interactions between the circle and the square (if there are any). Since PATTERN combines with COMPOSITION to generate a necessary condition on composition, several things compose an individual only so long as they jointly have some further power. The two blades of a pair of scissors compose an individual because even though each blade has some powers on its own, they are jointly able to cut through more things when the causal relations among their handles are right. When the blades are unhinged from one another, they cease to have those powers, so the individual they composed ceases to existthat is, they cease to compose an individual. But PATTERN also gives us a sufficient condition for composition. The causal power grounded in the interactions of several things is not accidental to the existence of their composite. To the contrary, the reason there is a pair of scissors and not just two scissor blades just is that their arrangement grounds some causal power that is distinct from the powers of each blade. We can see now what Spinoza's answer would be to the apparent counterexample

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mentioned earlier, according to which the bodies of two humans shaking hands would instantiate a pattern of communicated motions and thereby compose an individual. The two humans do indeed bear some causal relations to one another, but no further power is grounded in those causal relations. So they do not instantiate a pattern of causal relations after all, and they do not compose an individual.12 What about "Singular Things"? To highlight the strength of my interpretation, I want to consider a passage that several commentators have taken to be at odds with the definition of individuals quoted above. The passage I have in mind is Spinoza's puzzling definition of singular things:
By singular things I understand things that are finite and have a determinate existence. And if a number of individuals so concur in one action that together they are all the cause of one effect, I consider them all, to that extent, as one singular thing. (MId7)

I say this passage is puzzling because it contains two conditions on what it is to be a singular thing, and the two conditions are not obviously equivalent. According to the first condition, a singular thing is one thing that is finite and determinately exists. According to the second condition, a singular thing is several things that jointly cause some effect. There are two difficulties with reconciling the two parts of this definition. First, the reasoning behind the second part of the definition is not clear. Why, when several things jointly cause an effect, are they to be reckoned as one singular thing? That is, what is it about their jointly causing an effect that makes them compose one
fact, I think Spinoza would allow composition to admit of degrees, and that he has available an additional reply to Van Inwagen-style counterexamples: even if the two humans shaking hands (or whose hands are glued together, or what have you) do gain some further causal power in virtue of their causal relations to one another, it isn't very much causal power. So the individual their bodies compose is very weakly composed, and we aren't committed to very much in asserting its existence. I develop this line further in and I won't defend it here.
12In

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singular thing? Second, the connection between the the two parts of the definition is not clear. Somehow, when a number if individuals concur to produce one effect, they must jointly compose one singular thingthat is, by the first half of the definition, they must jointly compose one thing that is finite and has determinate existence. So satisfaction of the condition in the second half of the definition entails satisfaction of the condition in the first half. But the definition alone does not make it clear why this should be so. Over and above the puzzles internal to the definition of singular things, it presents an additional difficulty for understanding Spinoza's account of composition. It appears to be a different account of composition than the one Spinoza gives in the Physical Digression, COMPOSITION. This is the reading adopted by most commentators; most recently, Melamed (2010, 85-9) reads the second part of IId7 as expressing something like an account of composition. Yet (as Melamed sees it) unlike the definition of complex individuals, this definition does not seem to demand that the parts of a complex singular thing stand in a pattern of communicated motions. Indeed, it does not seem to demand that they bear any causal relations to one another at all. Rather, the parts of a complex singular thing need only be the joint cause of some effect, be it internal or external, momentary or ongoing, stable or unstable. Since this appears to conflict with the notion of a complex individual that Spinoza develops in the Physical Digression, it appears that Spinoza has not one, but two accounts of composition: one for (potentially disunified) singular things and another for (causally unified) individuals. Fortunately, the arguments for COMPOSITION and PATTERN that I have presented suggest a certain solution to this interpretive puzzle. On my interpretation, in order for several things jointly to produce an effect, those things must instantiate a pattern

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of causal relations, and so all singular things are composite individuals.13 Showing that all singular things are composite individuals turns out to be easy now that we have COMPOSITION and PATTERN in place. By PATTERN, it follows that several individuals "so concur in one action" only if they instantiate a pattern of causal relations. But if they instantiate a pattern of causal relations, then, by COMPOSITION, they compose an individual. So they are properly called one thing after all. This resolves the first puzzle, since it explains why Spinoza would think that several things acting together should be called one thing: they compose a an individual. The second puzzle was why Spinoza would think that the requirement that a singular thing be finite and have a determinate existence was equivalent to the requirement that the parts of a singular thing act together to produce one effect. When I argued for the first part of PATTERN, I drew heavily on Spinoza's assumption that every actually existing thing has some causal power. This assumption is hard at work in Spinoza's definition of singular things as well. What it means for a finite thing to have a determinate existence is that it causes some effect. When I argued for the second part of PATTERN, I showed that Spinoza thinks that several things can jointly produce an effect only if they jointly have an actual essencethat is, only if they jointly instantiate a pattern of causal relations. So, when several things jointly produce an effect (satisfying PATTERN), they compose an individual (by COMPOSITION) that has determinate existencethat is, there exists a singular thing that is composed of them. So every singular thing is a composite individual, in the technical sense developed in the Physical Digression.
is easy to see the reverse, that every (finite) composite individual must be a singular thing. By COMPOSITION, it follows that "a number of individuals" are "one singular thing" just when those individuals instantiate a pattern of causal relations. By PATTERN, it follows that those individuals instantiate a pattern of causal relations only if they jointly have some further causal powerthat is, only if they "so concur in one action that together they are all the cause of one effect". So every composite individual will be a singular thing.
13It

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This resolves the second puzzle: in order that several things jointly cause one effect, Spinoza thinks that effect must be produced in virtue of the causal relations among the several things. On Spinoza's view, it is simply not possible for several causally isolated things jointly to cause an effect.

3.2

The Composition of the Mind

With COMPOSITION and PATTERN on the table, we can draw some consequences of the interpretation for the composition of ideas, affects, and minds. To the extent that these consequences map to what Spinoza clearly claims about ideas, affects, and minds in the Ethics, these consequences are evidence in favor of my interpretation. The first step is to translate COMPOSITION into the attribute of thought. Instead of quantifying over things, we consider only ideas. Instead of speaking of causal relations in an attribute-neutral way, we speak of the relevant causal relations among ideas. What causal relations most fundamentally connect ideas, on Spinoza's view? The mental analogue to motion and rest, he claims, is "affirmation and negation" ('Hp49dem; cf. IIp49s 11/132 10-21).14 If the fundamental causal relation among bodies is the communication of motions, and the mental analogue of motion and rest is affirmation and negation, the fundamental causal relation among ideas will be the communication of affirmation from one idea to another. What does this mean? I take it to refer to the relation by which one idea either gives rise to or stifles another, increasing or decreasing that idea's power. That change in power may be reflected in the way the idea represents its object, but the relation by which an idea represents its object is not the same as the relation by which it gives rise to other ideas. That is, we can (and should) distinguish between the relation of mental causation and the
are individuated in terras of the content they affirm or deny, then, just as bodies are individuated in terms of their motion and rest (MIpl3s LI). I owe this point to John Morrison.
14Ideas

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relation of mental representationbetween, on the one hand, several ideas jointly affirming some object (a representational notion) and, on the other hand, several ideas communicating their affirmation among one another (a causal notion).15 The importance of this distinction becomes clear once it is observed that the composition of a complex idea is grounded in the causal relations among its parts. Since ideas cannot bear causal relations to bodies, but ideas can represent bodies, the composition of an idea cannot be grounded in or explained by what an idea represents. The appropriate instance of COMPOSITION for the attribute of thought is: IDEAS: Some ideas compose an individual if and only if they instantiate a pattern of communicated affirmation. Given this distinction, IDEAS says that several ideas do not compose an individual in virtue of what they jointly represent, but rather in virtue of their giving rise to one another according to a certain pattern.16 To see how this account of composition will play out for ideas, consider some cases of interest. Suppose an idea of wings and an idea of a horse compose a single, complex individual (call it Pegasus) when the idea of the horse gives rise to the idea of wings, and vice versa. This might happen in the pattern of ideas that composes my mind, depending upon my memories and imaginationsay, if I have been reading about Perseus.17 Conversely, if the idea of the horse does not give rise to the idea of
Rocca (2003, Sec. 2) emphasizes the importance for Spinoza of the causal relations among ideas, but does not dwell on the distinction I am trying to emphasize here. (However, cf. (Delia Rocca, 1996a, Ch. 2).) 16This point is important because it allows Spinoza later to argue that our ability to associate one idea with another is not restricted by the content of those ideas. Even though sadness and my idea of God have (at least by the end of the Ethics) diametrically opposed representational content, I can nonetheless train myself to think of God whenever I feel sadness, thereby (Spinoza thinks) diminishing my sadness. 17See the discussion of memory atIIpl8s. Intriguingly, it seems that no such complex idea will exist in the infinite intellect, since the idea's existence depends upon a pattern of communicated affirmation between ideas "according to the order and connection of the affections of the human body" rather than the intellect (IIpl8s).
15Della

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wings, as might happen if I have never heard the myth of Perseus, those ideas will not compose an individual in the pattern of ideas that composes my mind. The same story can also be told for most of the affects and passions. The basic affectsdesire [cupiditas], joy [laetitia], and sadness [tristitia]are ideas that represent changes in the power of the body,18 Spinoza treats these three affects as "primitive" [primitivos] (ZIII Definitions of the Affects, "Wonder, Explanation"). The other affects, including love, hate, honor, and shame, are ideas composed of these basic affects and certain kinds of other ideas. That is, they exist in virtue of certain patterns of association between an affect and another idea. For example, love is "joy, accompanied by the idea of an external cause" (ibid, "Love"), and hatred is "sadness, accompanied by the idea of an external cause" (ibid, "Hatred"). This relation of accompanying seems to be the causal relation of association by which two ideas mutually give rise to one another, for Spinoza. We feel love when we have an affect (idea) of joy that causes us to have an idea of an external cause of that joy, and we feel love when our idea of that external cause causes us to experience joy.19 Spinoza's picture of the affects and passions fits well with the account of composition developed so far: complex affects, like any other composite idea, exist in virtue of the pattern of communicated affirmation among component ideas and affects. As with bodies, composite ideas and affects must meet the requirements expressed in PATTERN. An affect's particular pattern of association grants it certain sorts of power in the mind. Take love: when a mind is affected by love, the idea of the beloved gives rise to joy, and joy gives rise to the idea of the beloved. But these associations
using "basic" here in the sense of primitive; all of the other affects are derived in some way from the three basic ones. 19See the series of propositions discussing love and hatred after MIIpl9, esp. 25: "We strive to affirm, concerning ourselves and what we love, whatever we imagine to affect with joy ourselves or what we love." So not only does love consist in our feeling joy at the thought of the object of our love, it also leads us to think of the beloved when we experience other sorts of joy.
18I'm

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axe not inert; they in turn give rise to other affects and ideas. I see a beautiful film, or taste a delicious meal, and the joy I feel in these things makes me desire to share them with my beloved, to wish that my beloved were present (if she is not), or just to further enjoy the fact that my beloved is present (if she is). Since the pattern of communicated affirmation between joy and the idea of the beloved gives rise to these further affects, the pleasure and the idea of the beloved must compose an individual ideanamely, my affect of love. In general, the power of an affect is to give rise to further affects as well as to a variety of actions. Finally, my mind itself, since it is the idea of my body, instantiates a very complicated pattern of communicated affirmation. On Spinoza's view, the idea of each extended part of my body, x, gives rise to the ideas of those other parts with which x reciprocally communicates motions.20 By communicating affirmation to one another in these ways, the ideas of my mind jointly gain a further power: they become able to affirm or negate representations of the complex affections of my body (i?IIpl4-15). So, in virtue of its pattern of causal relations, the ideas of the mind become able to represent the mind's affects; this allows the mind to have affects of love, hatred, and the like, that take the mind's affects as their objects. For instance, it allows the mind to be affected by hatred, but also to have a hatred for that hatred.21 I will not here develop all of the interesting consequences of COMPOSITION and PATTERN for Spinoza's theory of ideasfor instance, these theses give us a framework
notice that when my body dies, my mind will no longer instantiate a pattern of communicated affirmation in virtue of my body's parts instantiating a pattern of communicated motion, so (it seems) those ideas will cease to compose my mind. This leads to the worry, shared by many commentators, that Spinoza's doctrine of the eternity of the mind is inconsistent with the principle of parallelism. For the most vitriolic (but heartfelt) condemnation of Spinoza's apparent inconsistency on this point, see Bennett (1984, 357-375). I consider Spinoza's "eternal part of the mind" in the Conclusion, albeit briefly and as a problem for future research. 21I have been very much influenced here by Eugene Marshall. He emphasizes the importance of second-order affects for consciousness in Marshall (Forthcoming), and I am largely convinced by his arguments.
20But

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for talking about collective minds and actions, and therefore form part of the basis for a Spinozist account of collective responsibility. My aim here is simply to provide more evidence for the interpretation itself. Since all of the conclusions about complex ideas, affects, and minds just listed are claims that Spinoza indeed makes about complex ideas, affects, and minds, this is good reason to think that Spinoza endorses COMPOSITION and PATTERN.

3.3

Conatus and the Power of a Composite As further corroborating evidence for my reading, I want to argue that attributing

PATTERN to Spinoza allows us to give a neat explanation of one of his most puzzling claims. Near the beginning of Ethics III, Spinoza writes:

P4: No thing can be destroyed except through an external cause. Dem: This proposition is evident through itself. For the definition of any thing affirms, and does not deny, the thing's essence, or [in other words] it posits the thing's essence and does not take it away. So while we attend only to the thing itself, and not to external causes, we shall not be able to find anything in it which can destroy it, q.e.d.

Spinoza does not mince words here. On his view, nothing can be the cause of its own destructionand, as the demonstration reveals, he considers the very idea of selfdestruction to be incoherent, hence his claim that "This proposition is evident through itself." There are two great ironies about this proposition and its demonstration. Although it is a hefty metaphysical thesis, Spinoza apparently takes it to be "evident through itself [per se patet]". Moreover, in spite of the fact that he takes it to be self evident, Spinoza provides an especially confusing argument on its behalf.

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On the face of it, IIIp4 and its accompanying demonstration are very strange. Commentators who are otherwise sympathetic to Spinoza's metaphysics have called this proposition "plainly false" (Matson, 1977, 407), the argument for it "faulty" (Bennett, 1984, 234). It is subject to such an array of apparent counterexamples that readers tend to be puzzled, not about whether the proposition is true, but why Spinoza would ever have thought it was. Nonetheless, in the spirit of following the argument wherever it leads, I want to investigate a reconstruction of Spinoza's argument for this outrageous claim. It turns out, I shall argue, that IIIp4 follows from some other parts of Spinoza's metaphysics in conjunction with the account of composition I have attributed to him, and so the conatus is not so isolated from the earlier books of the Ethics as the demonstration might lead one to believe. There are many good analyses of the role of IIIp4 in Spinoza's argument for his conatus doctrine, the claim that, "Each thing, insofar as it is in itself, strives to persevere in its being" (IIIp6).22 Some have argued that the demonstration of IIIp6 relies heavily upon the impossibility of self-destructione.g., Delia Rocca (1996b, 202-5, 209-10) and Bennett (1984, 240-2). Other authors have contended that the reference to IIIp4 is not doing any real work in the argument for the conatus doctrine, though it serves to "show how the doctrine is true" (Gaxrett 2002, 143-6; cf. Lin 2004 for a related view). More recently, Viljanen (2008a) has persuasively argued for a reconciliation between the two views, articulating a reading on which there are no dead references in Spinoza's demonstration of IIIp6. I find the latter reading useful, and to a certain extent it informs the reading of Spinoza I propose (rather brusquely) here. However, I am not attempting to show whether or how IIIp4 is used in the derivation of the conatus doctrine, and so my discussion parts ways early on from standard scholarly work in this vein. While most authors have concerned themselves
22

Unaquaequae res, quantum in se est, in suo esse perseverare conatur.

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with the way IIIp4 is related to IIIp6, I am interested in Spinoza's philosophical reasons for adopting IIIp4 itself. The demonstration, which uncharacteristically invokes no prior axioms or propositions of the Ethics, is deceptively complex. Spinoza claims it is self-evident, but this unsurprisingly fails to shed light on the proposition. Spinoza here uses language, as he occasionally does elsewhere, which makes it sound as though he is talking about our epistemic capacities (e.g., "while we attend..."). Before a reader has come to grips with Spinoza's various technical terms, the Ethics seems liberally peppered with such confusions of the epistemic and the metaphysical.23 As usual, however, Spinoza is actually making a metaphysical claim; and the fact that he takes it to be equivalent to the desired conclusion (the dictum that nothing can destroy itself) reveals the claim's metaphysical strength. The first thing to notice is that, although the proposition is ostensibly about the impossibility of self-destruction in a general sense, its demonstration shows that Spinoza's notion of an "external cause" of a thing's destruction is more rarefied than our own. It is tempting to understand the externality of causes like this: an effect E is produced by causes external to x iff x is not one of the causes of E. But the demonstration suggests that Spinoza thinks of anything that does not follow from a thing's "definition" as external to that thingwhen we "attend only to the thing itself," we are just supposed to be considering "the definition of [the] thing." So we really have something like the following notion of externality:
early as Idl: "By cause of itself, I understand...that whose nature cannot be conceived except as existing." The reader will naturally ask, whose powers of conceiving are at issue here? As I read the text, what Spinoza has in mind turns out to have very little to do with the the way we normally understand the verb "to conceive". See Newlands (2010) and Delia Rocca (2008, 43-5).
23As

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an effect E is produced by causes external to x iff the definition of x does not imply that x causes E.24 Unfortunately, this raises another difficulty: just what is a definition of a thing? The idea seems to be that a thing's definition is such that if (and only if) it is met, the thing exists (since its essence is "posited"). Here is one way we might try to capture the notion of a thing's definition, in terms congenial to the idiom of contemporary metaphysics: A thing's definition is the proposition such that, necessarily, it is true iff the thing exists. If the proposition that defines a thing is true, say that its definition is satisfied. There axe at least two problems with this initial attempt to characterize definitions. First, this formulation allows for trivial definitions. According to the criterion just given, the proposition that Sarah exists is the definition of Sarahyet clearly this is a reductio in virtue of its triviality. And the trivial definition leads to circularity. We want to be able to infer that x exists from the satisfaction of its definition; if x's definition is met in virtue of the proposition that x exists being true, then the desired inference would beg the question. A second problem, inspired by the problem of triviality/circularity, is that we have not actually guaranteed the uniqueness of a thing's definition. There will in fact be an infinite number of definitions for any given individual, of which definitions an infinite
Garrett (2002, 137-8). He presents what he calls Spinoza's "Conception Through Essence Doctrine": Whatever is conceived through x is conceived through the essence of x. (2d2) I take myself to be discussing the same doctrine using the language of IIIp4 rather than the notion of "conceiving through" that features prominently in other parts of the Ethics. The point is that one thing can function as the cause or reason for another iff the essence of the first explains the second.
24Cf.

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number will be trivial. In addition to the proposition that x exists, contenders to the throne include the proposition that x exists & every natural number has a successor, the proposition that x exists & 2 is a prime number, and so forth. In general, the conjunction of the trivial definition and any valid proposition whatsoever will meet the above criterion, and so will also be a definition.25 However, Spinoza explicitly rejects this notion of a definition in an earlier work, the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (TIE). There, he explains that the definition of a "created" thing must meet two requirements, one of which is that:
...when [the definition] is considered alone, without any others conjoined, all the thing's properties can be deduced [concludi possint] from it... (Geb 11/35)

Following on this, Spinoza explains that the definition of "an uncreated thing" likewise involves a number of requirements, the last of which reads:
Finally (though it is not very necessary to note this) it is required that all [of the thing's] properties be deduced [concludantur] from its definition, (ibid)

In either case, then, a definition is such that it can serve as the logical ground for inferring "all...the properties" of the definiendum. Although Spinoza is here adopting the language of religious traditions involving creation, the distinction between created and uncreated things invoked in the TIE maps quite well to the distinction between substance and mode so prominent in the Ethics. For instance, the first requirement on the definition of an uncreated thing is "that the object should require nothing else except its own being for its explanation" (ibid). With striking similarity, in the Ethics we find that a substance is that which is "conceived through itself" and "does not
is the problem observed by Fine (1994). Fine wants to use definitions as the basis for essences, hoping to prevent essences from including arbitrary necessary propositions. As we will see, Spinoza endorses what we can call a constructive account of essences rather than a modal one, and so he avoids the difficulties with which Fine is (rightly) concerned.
25This

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require the concept of another thing, from which it must be formed" (2?Id3). Owing to this similarity, it is fair to apply the account of definitions that Spinoza outlines in the TIE to his use of that term in the Ethicsa useful trick, for the Ethics contains no explanation of what Spinoza has in mind when he uses the term 'definition'. Given that we may take this early passage as representative of Spinoza's mature view in the Ethics, how are we to understand this definition of definitions? I read Spinoza as claiming that the definition of a thing is a blueprint for constructing it, and that the way in which it is constructed determines and grounds the causal powers of the resulting thing. The definition of a particular living human body would specify the causal pattern in which its parts stand, and from that pattern it would follow, a priori, that the body has (and lacks) certain powers.26 This may seem an odd reading, given that in the quoted passage Spinoza speaks only of "properties" \propriatates] rather than powers, but just before that passage, he writes that "a definition will have to explain the inmost essence of the thing, and to take care not to use certain propria in its place" (Geb 11/34). Spinoza is implicitly drawing a distinction between a thing's essential properties and those properties that, although they follow from its essence, are not essential to it. As we saw from Spinoza's demonstration for i?IIIp7, quoted above, we should take an individual's causal powers to follow from its essence in just this way.27 So a proper definition of a thing must be such that all of its powers may be "deduced" from that definition.
26The deduction in question would obviously beyond the ability of anyone to perform; Spinoza is an optimist about the power of the human body, and a pessimist about the power of the human mind: "For indeed, no one has yet determined what the body can do... [T]he body itself, simply from the laws of its own nature, can do many things which its mind wonders at" (J5IIIp2s, Geb 11/142). 27Spinoza is of course leaning on the tripartite Scholastic distinction between essences, properties, and accidents. My reading of Spinoza attributes to him the claim that there are no accidental causal powers; all of an individual's causal powers follow from its essence. I think this is very much in keeping with the spirit of his discussion of power and action"we [are said to] act...when something in us or outside us follows from our nature...alone" ('IIId2).

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With this text in the background, I propose that we should read the demonstration of 'IIIp4 in the following way. I think the reason Spinoza takes it to be self-evidently absurd for something to have the causal power of destroying itself is the same as the reason he takes a square circle to be absurdhe believes its very definition entails a contradiction.28 To see how the contradiction might go, we can run something like the following argument: 1. Suppose that x has the causal power of destroying itself. 2. Since x's causal powers follow from its essence, xs power to destroy itself follows from its essence. (Def. of Essences) 3. The definition of x affirms the essence of x. (Def. of Definitions) 4. The definition of x affirms that x has the causal power of destroying itself. (1-3) 5. If the definition of x were satisfied, x would exist. (3, Def. of Essences) 6. If x existed, x's essential features (including its power of destroying itself) would be realized. (2, Def. of Essences) 7. So, if the definition of x were satisfied, x would not exist. (5, 6)
28I assume throughout the strong sense of the definite article: to say that a is the cause of 6 is meant to convey that a is the sole cause of b. So, to be clear, what is at issue is whether a thing can be destroyed solely by itself. I am also playing a bit loose with the difference between causal powers and causation. On the face of it, we might imagine it was possible to have a causal power to produce effect E without actually producing effect E. However, Spinoza's necessitarianism does not appear to leave room for such unactualized powers: an individual has the causal power to produce E only if that individual actually produces E, since the necessitarian thesis implies that if it didn't produce E, it couldn't do so. And if it couldn't do so, then it surely did not have the power to do so. A useful discussion of Spinoza's reasoning can be found in Viljanen (2011, 63-64). Setting aside the philosophical justification for rejecting unactualized powers, there are also several passages that suggest Spinoza wanted to blur the distinction between the two concepts. In Ethics I, he focuses on causation in the propositions from 26-29, then shifts focus to causal power in 34-36. So far as book I is concerned, these could be different concepts. However, in 2?IIIp6, he appeals to the concept of causation in p4 and uses that in conjunction with the concept of causal power invoked in book I, running them together.

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8. Hence the definition of x cannot be satisfied; x necessarily fails to exist. (5, 7)

Since the definition's satisfaction entails a contradiction, it follows that there can be no such thing as xthat is, there can be nothing that has the causal power of destroying itself. This, I think, is the way Spinoza intended the argument for IIIp4 to work. Although Spinoza frames his argument positively, as reasoning based solely on what a thing's essence "affirms" of it, that is clearly not the whole story. It can't be; precisely what is at issue is whether something's essence could "affirm" of it that it has the power to destroy itself. The real question, then, is what principles Spinoza is implicitly invoking in his discussion of self-destruction; my proposed reading is intended to show that if one adopts Spinoza's conceptions of definitions, essences, and causal powers, they jointly provide a reason to reject the possibility of something that has the causal power of destroying itself. (I say a reason to reject that possibility, not a conclusive proof: it seems to me that even my reconstruction of Spinoza's thought here suffers from serious ambiguity regarding time and tense.) Of course, the reason this argument is taken to be bad is not just because it is unclear. It seems bad because it entails a host of absurdities and apparent counterexamples. As Matson (1977) avers, the sun is a thing with an essence if anything is; yet the fact remains that what it is to be a starhence what it is to be the sunseems to include its eventual self-destruction, and by forces that can be understood through the sun's own nature. Spinoza could of course respond in two different ways. One response would be to deny that the sun is an individual composed of its atoms. This response is not beyond the pale; although the sun appears stable to us, the truth (we are assured by astrophysicists) is that it will eventually consume itself. But it seems to me that this is not the response Spinoza would favor, given that he takes living organisms to be individuals.

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Another response would be to reject reject Matson's judgment that the sun really has the causal power of destroying itself. Indeed, Spinoza's conceptions of essences and causal powers give him good reason to take this route. If a certain causal power is essential to stars, then something that does not have that causal power is not a star. Yet a star that never runs out of fuel seems perfectly conceivableperhaps alien scientists are funneling matter into them continuously. Or, even more easily, we can conceive of a star being destroyed by something external to it. Would the fact that the star failed to destroy itself mean it never existed in the first place? That would be odd. But if Spinoza refuses to ground the causal power that eventually destroys the sun in the sun itself, where is it grounded? Here is where the distinction between the powers of a whole and the powers of its parts becomes crucial. I think Spinoza must say that the causal power by which the sun is destroyed inheres in the sun's parts, but not in the sun. Strange though it may seem, it is perfectly in keeping with the way I have argued Spinoza's account of composition bears on causal powers. According to COMPOSITION and PATTERN, several things (the xs) compose an individual (y) only if the xs interactions ground some further causal powers. These further, derivative causal powers are not identical with the causal powers of the xs taken singly, nor are they merely conjunctive (that is, the derivative powers are not just conjunctions of the powers of the xs). If we further claim on Spinoza's behalf that y's powers are all and only these derivative powers, it follows that t/'s powers are distinct from the powers of the xs.29 This makes room for Spinoza to say that, although it seems as
here may seem somewhat similar to a common move in recent accounts of nonreductive physicalism (NRP). The claim made on behalf of NEP is that the causal powers of a mind are distinct from the causal powers of the body (or brain) on which the mind depends, in the way that a proper subset of a set is distinct from that set. That is, although the powers of a mind are included among the powers of a physical thing, they are distinct from the powers of that physical thing because they are a subset of those powers. (See, e.g., Wilson 2011, for a clear discussion of this strategy.) The disanalogy here is that I do not want to say that the set of powers of an individual
29 My strategy

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if the sun is destroying itself, in fact the sun is being destroyed by its parts. So, by appealing to Spinoza's account of composition, we can escape the most absurd of the counterexamples that seem to result from his rejection of the possibility of self-destruction.

Conclusion In this chapter, I argued for a principle intended to give more definite content to the notion of a "pattern of causal relations" that is, on my reading, so central to Spinoza's understanding of composite beings. Specifically, I argued that Spinoza accepts PATTERN: several things instantiate a pattern of causal relations just in case they instantiate some causal relations and those relations ground some further causal power. I then used this principle in conjunction with COMPOSITION to draw out some features of Spinoza's views about complex ideas, and also to resolve some of the problems that beset his claim that nothing can destroy itself. Along the way, I have tried to draw out the passages that suggest that Spinoza holds this account of composition, and further, that he recognizes it as such. These passages weave a rough historical argument for my interpretation. I have so far abstained from giving a philosophical argument for the account; developing such an argument is the project of the final two chapters. My argument will have two components. I will first show how the account flows out of Spinoza's other metaphysical principles, in particular out of the conjunction of his principle of sufficient reason, his
is a subset of the powers of its parts. Instead, I am claiming that an individual's powers are derived from, though not included among, the powers of its parts. This move is not open to the proponent of NRP because she must satisfy the criterion that the mental is nothing over and above the physical. Spinoza, by contrast, is happy to say that a complex individual is something over and above its parts, even if it wholly depends upon those parts. As we will see in Chapter 4, he is perfectly happy to accept reduction without elimination. This difference in strategy allows the Spinozist to avoid standard criticisms of the powers-based subset strategy (as found in, e.g., Morris 2011 and Audi Forthcoming).

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conatus doctrine, and his acceptance of derivative causal powers. These principles jointly demand the least arbitrary account of composition that is not Universalism or Nihilism, and Spinoza's account is the best candidate. I will then provide independent arguments in favor of these metaphysical principles. After working through these positive arguments for Spinoza's account in chapter 4, I will turn in the last chapter to defending the account from the main challenge to moderate accounts of composition: the argument from vagueness.

Chapter 4

Defending the Account

Spinoza's account of composition is based on is based on the pattern of causal relations among the composing objects. Specifically, I have argued that Spinoza's (fully general, attribute-neutral) account is: COMPOSITION: Some things compose an individual if and only if they instantiate a pattern of causal relations. Although the notion of a pattern of causal relations seemed nebulous, I further argued Spinoza maintains another biconditional: PATTERN: Some things instantiate a pattern of causal relations if and only if they instantiate some causal relations and those causal relations ground some causal power. Taken in tandem, these two theses specify Spinoza's account of composition in terms of causationfirst in terms of causal relations, then in terms of causal powers. Although I have adduced a variety of passages from the Ethics in support of this interpretation at each step along the path of its development, I have not discussed what overarching metaphysical argument Spinoza could offer in its defense. I have aigued that my interpretation of Spinoza is consistent with, and able to make sense of, the text. In places, I have also gestured at the intuitions that might underwrite Spinoza's account. However, all of this argumentative driftwood does little to make the account genuinely convincing. What we are missing is an argument that the

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account is better than its numerous competitorsthat it is not only appropriate to Spinoza's metaphysics, but that it is an account we might yet consider tenable. In this chapter, I will provide such an argument for Spinoza's account of composition. Although Spinoza does not himself develop the arguments I will consider here, my aim is to give arguments that are suggested by, and in line with, his metaphysical principles. In part 1, I argue that three of Spinoza's metaphysical principles jointly rule out the majority of the available candidate accounts of composition. His principle of sufficient reason implies that there can be no arbitrary composites, which rules out most moderate accounts of composition, including all varieties of Organicism. His theory of essence rules out both Universalism and accounts that simply conflate composition with causal connection. And his views on the nature of, and connection between, existence and causal power rule out Nihilism and Eliminativism. Then in part 2, I show how my interpretation of Spinoza's account, COMPOSITION in conjunction with PATTERN, meets the restrictions imposed by each of these principles. In part 3, I present some compelling reasons for thinking that these three principles central to Spinoza's account of composition are, in fact, true. The version of the principle of sufficient reason required for the argument is implicitly endorsed in philosophical and scientific argumentation. Spinoza's theory of essence has better features than a number of rival accounts of essence. Finally, the claim that there are non-fundamental (but non-emergent) causal powers seems far more plausible than the alternative. 4.1 What Composition Could Not Be

There are at least three central principles governing existence, for Spinoza: his principle of sufficient reason, his theory of essence, and his theory of causal power. Because composition entails existencenamely the existence of the compositethese

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principles entail restrictions on composition as well. Now we must consider just what restrictions are so entailed. Spinoza's PSR and arbitrary existence Spinoza's version of the principle of sufficient reason, as specified in iJIplldem, is a necessary condition on existence. In that passage, he claims, "For each thing there must be assigned a cause, or reason, both for its existence and for its nonexistence." The term "reason" here is supposed to be synonymous with "cause"Spinoza pairs them using the explicative conjunction "sive"so we know that the principle is not (in spite of the terminology) intended to be merely epistemological. Furthermore, Spinoza takes causes to be conceptually related to their effects, such that the cause of a thing serves as the explanation for its existence. So all existing things have an explanation for their existence, and all nonexisting things have an explanation for their nonexistence. Admittedly, this interpretation of Spinoza's understanding of the relationship between causes, concepts, reasons, and explanations is slightly tendentious. I think the view I take up here is endorsed by most recent interpreters of Spinoza, but let me motivate it a bit nonetheless. The claim that Spinoza takes causal relations to be (or at least to entail) conceptual relations is based primarily upon EI&4, "The knowledge [cognitio] of an effect depends on, and involves, the knowledge of its cause." This axiom seems only to be warranted if the concept of the cause somehow contains or implies the concept of the effect. Wilson criticizes this interpretation, noting that "in some uses of the axiom, the 'knowledge' of the cause is supposed to follow from the 'knowledge' of the effect" (Wilson, 1999, 145). She argues that the term "cognitio" does not only denote what Spinoza calls "adequate ideas", but also the "mutilated and confused ideas" of the imagination. Insofar as Wilson admits that

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Spinoza thinks causes serve to explain their effects, though, her arguments do not hinder my interpretation. A number of other passages lend further credence to this reading, according to which Spinoza holds that if A is caused by B, then A is explained by B. In one such passage, Spinoza claims that the body cannot cause mental effects, and part of his reasoning is that "All modes of thinking have God for a cause, insofar as he is a thinking thing, and not insofar as he is explained by another attribute" (2?IId2dem). Spinoza is arguing that the body cannot be the cause of mental effects because mental effects are explained by the attribute of thought, not by the attribute of extension. But in order for this argument to go through, we need the inference bridging causes and explanations. (The argument puts me in mind of an inversion of Kim's Causal Exclusion Argument, though Spinoza does not make his case on those lines.1 It is easy to imagine him agreeing with Kim that if some state of the body did cause a certain mental state, all the explanatory work would be done by that bodily state. Appealing to prior mental states would add no explanatory value to the picture just because it would add no causal value to the picture. But he would dissent from Kim's conclusion and opt for the modus tollens: Since mental states must do the explanatory work, Spinoza would reason, bodily states can't do the causal work.) Spinoza also uses J5Ia4 in a way that implies the converse, that if A is explained by B, then A is caused by B. In order to derive a contradiction, he writes,
If you deny...[that] God is the cause of the essence of things...[then] (by Ia4) the essence of things can be conceived without God. But (by Ipl5) this is absurd. (Ipl5dem)

The axiom is here used to affirm that if A is conceived through B, then A is caused by B. Since Spinoza elsewhere takes the conceived-through relation to be identical
(2003, 155-9) gives two versions of the argument, including one that does not depend on any notions (like supervenience) that would have been foreign to Spinoza.
1Kim

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with the relation of explanation, we obtain the result that if A is explained by B, then A is caused by B. Altogether, we obtain the biconditional: A is caused by B if and only if A is explained by B. These passages therefore suggest that Spinoza takes causation and explanation to be coextensive. The cause of something is a comprehensive explanation for its existence, and the comprehensive explanation for something's existence is just its cause.2 How does all of this bear on the special composition question? Recall that the problem I have been concerned with in this dissertation is to find the necessary and sufficient conditions under which some objects, the xs, compose an individual, y. Now, any necessary conditions on y's existence will also be necessary conditions that must be satisfied in order that the xs compose y. This should be obvious. If the xs compose y, then y exists; and if y exists, all of the necessary conditions on its existence must be satisfied. That is why theses like the principle of sufficient reason are of interest in this context. Insofar as Spinoza's principle of sufficient reason implies a necessary condition on existence, it also implies a necessary condition on composition. The implied condition is closely related to the principle from which it derives. According to Spinoza's PSR, given any case of composition, there must be some explanationor reason, or cause, all coextensive for Spinozafor the fact that the objects compose something rather than nothing. So Spinoza's PSR rules out any
2It is important to bear in mind that causation and explanation function on two levels, for Spinoza, both at level of the metaphysical (what is sometimes called 'Vertical" causae tion/explanation) as well as at the level of physical and mental ("horizontal" causation/explanation). This is why he can in one breath claim that "God is the efficient cause...of the existence of things" (Ip25) and in the next claim that "anything which is finite and has determinate existence...is determined to exist and produce an effect by another cause, which is also finite and has a determinate existence..." (Ip28). These may look contradictory, but they merely track different levels of causae tion. My claim is that metaphysical causation is identical with metaphysical explanation (so God both causes and explains modes) and physical/mental causation is identical with physical/mental explanation (so a particular physical mode both causes and explains a particular physical effect). Spinoza is not precise about this distinction, but it is implied by Ip25/Ip28 (just quoted) as well as his discussion of the way God relates to the ideas of singular things (e.g., IIp9 & IIpllc).

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proposed account that allows for some cases of composition that do not have such an explanation. In a word, it rules out accounts of composition that allow for arbitrary composites. Although this may seem a meagre challenge, a number of accounts of composition cannot meet it. I'll consider two examples, one that so far as I am aware has only once been defended in the literature, and one that has been championed by a number of authors. The first view I have in mind is the view that it is simply a brute fact that several things compose an individual (whenever they do). I'll call this Brutahsm. The second view is that several things compose an individual whenever those things constitute a life- -the view that I have already referred to as Organicism.3

The Arbitrariness of Brutalism Start with Brutalism. It may seem strange to think that facts about composition are simply brute, but here is one motivation for it: no other account seems able to render all and only the judgments of our pre-philosophical intuitions about composition.4
articulations and defenses of Organicism, see: (1) Leibniz (1989) for a bold and original statement of the view, particularly in his letters to Johann Bernoulli. In answer to Bernoulli's version of the special composition question, Leibniz replies, "You ask how far one must proceed in order to have something that is a substance, but not [several] substances. I respond that such things present themselves immediately and even without subdivision, and that every animal is such a thing" (Leibniz to Bernoulli, 20/30 September 1698, emph. added). (2) van Inwagen (1995) for the definitive contemporary analytic articulation of pure Organicism. For Van Inwagen, u(3y the xs compose y) if and only if the activity of the xs constitutes a life (or there is only one of the xs)" (van Inwagen, 1995, 82). (3) Merricks (2001) for a very restricted version of the view that takes into account the concern that attributing causal powers to composites would overdetermine their effects. Instead, he countenances only composite things that have causal powers that cannot be reductively explained in terms of the powers of their parts. Merricks concludes that it may be that all living things have such emergent causal powershe takes no stance on the matterbut certainly (he argues) conscious things, like humans, possess such emergent powers. (It is perhaps a stretch to include his view, which he terms Eliminativism, in this list. I include it anyway for, de facto, the only composites on Merricks' view will be living organisms, namely human beings and some other animals.) 4Where "pre-philosophical" presumably means something like "linguistic". As I understand it, the idea would be something like the following account of composition: If a language contains a singular noun that can be used successfully to refer to several objects simultaneously, then those
3For

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The most popular accounts of composition tell us that there are either way too many or way too few composites: either there are no tables or mountains, or there is a table-mountain (and much more) in addition to each table and each mountain. But if Brutalism is right, then we can tailor the concept of composition to our liking. The table exists, and the mountain, but they do not compose any weird table-mountain object. The price we pay for this tailor-made class of composites is that we give up hope of responding to the question, "Why do these objects compose something while those do not?" This is a bad question, the defender of Brutalism will insist, for composition is conceptually fundamental. We use facts about composition to explain other factsfor instance, we might explain a table's having a certain center of gravity by appealing to the fact that it is composed of certain parts bearing a certain structurebut we can go no deeper than composition. There just is no other set of facts to which we can appeal in order to explain the facts about composition.5 One premise of Markosian's argument for his view seems to be that it is epistemically necessary to take the concept of composition as part of a small, interdefinable circle of mereological concepts. So (the argument goes) it is pointless to look for an account of composition in non-mereological terms, because any concept to which we could legitimately appeal in accounting for composition will be part of that circle,
objects compose an individual relative to that language. So since we have the words "baseball" and "bat" to refer to certain kinds of atoms in certain configurations, bats and baseballs exist relative to English. But since we have no singular noun that can at once pick out a baseball and a bat, they do not in turn compose any third object. This seems to capture the way a native speaker of a particular language might think about composition prior to reflecting upon the matter. However, Markosian seems to think that even this linguistic account is too simplistic to capture folk intuitions about composition, so that "There is no true, non-trivial, and finitely long answer to [the special composition question]" (Markosian, 1998, 214). 5There is a closely related view, sometimes called Commonsense Ontology, advocated by authors like Hirsch (2005) who do not take debates about the ontology of ordinary material objects seriously. Commonsense Ontology is not strictly speaking an account of composition, but it does entail many of the same claims as Brutalism, especially the claim that there is no explanation for the fact that some things compose an individual. Because Hirsch's view shares this in common with Brutalism, my Spinozistic objection to Markosian will apply to Hirsch as well.

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i.e., it will in fact be a mereological concept. It is important that the circle be small, because the force of Markosian's claim would be lost were he simply to insist that any concept we appealed to in an account of composition must be mereological; that would beg the question at hand. But then, contrary to Markosian's claim, it turns out to be perfectly possible to account for composition in non-mereological terms. For example, it is possible to treat the (mereological) concept of composition in terms of the (topological) concept of connection. The approach considered by Casati & Varzi (1999, 62-7) is to define a topological enclosure relation in terms of the connection relation, then to define parthood as topological enclosure. While this approach only does the job for spatiotemporal parthood, it is one way in which we can conceive of grounding facts about composition in other, non-mereological facts. (Indeed, if one is a nominalist and reductive physicalist, then one might well argue that topological enclosure and parthood are coextensive.) For another possibility, we might look to Spinoza's treatment of the concept of composition in terms of the concept of causation, the treatment I've elaborated in these past two chapters. In neither case do we need to appeal to an obviously mereological concept on the right-hand side of our account of composition. Either way, we have reason to think that facts about composition could indeed be explained in terms of other facts, facts that involve no mereological concepts. Although this does not render Brutalism false, it does strip away the motivation for the viewat least much of the motivation provided by Markosianeven independently of our commitment to the PSR. However, I mentioned Brutalism here primarily because it is the antithesis of the condition on composition that is imposed by the PSR. The thesis that facts about composition are are brute directly implies that if there are any composites, they are inexplicable and arbitrary. (Indeed,, even if it should turn out that there are no composites, Brutalism entails that the fact that there are no composites is itself a

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brute fact.) As long as we maintain that facts about composition are explicableas Spinoza ought to, and does, maintainwe must reject Brutalism. But I also mention it to highlight that the special composition question is an area of metaphysics in which our thinking, prior to reflection, is particularly muddled. Markosian is exactly right that none of the best philosophical accounts of composition capture all and only our pre-philosophical intuitions, or even close. All of the best candidate accounts are highly revisionaxy. But that does not mean that we should give up hope! It means rather that we ought to seek out whatever reasons may lie behind our intuitions, then seek to accommodate as many of them as possible. Some of those reasons will no doubt be inconsistent with others, in which case we must look to other metaphysical virtues to resolve the matter.

The Arbitrariness of Organicism On to Organicism, the view that several objects compose an individual if and only if those objects constitute a life. Spinoza is, of course, friendly to the idea that several objects compose an individual if they constitute a life. The central motivation behind his physics of individuals is to draw out the consequences of the fact that "The human body is composed of a great many individuals of different natures..." (Post. 1 after TIpl3s). However, pace Bennett (1984, 107), there is little reason to think Spinoza's account of composition is a "theory of organisms"; not every stable pattern of causal relations will constitute a life.6
does make some interesting remarks about life in his earliest published work, the "Metaphysical Thoughts" appended to Descartes' "Principles of Philosophy". Under the heading "What life is, and what it is in God," Spinoza writes, So we understand by life the force through which things persevere in their being. And because that force is different from the things themselves, we say properly that the things themselves have life. But the power by which God perseveres in his being is nothing but his essence. So they speak best who call God life. (CM II, Chapter VI)
6Spinoza

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Indeed, the PSR provides Spinoza with a principled objection to Organicism. The objection is not that living organisms fail to be composite wholes, of course. As I have already stated, Spinoza thinks that they are. The objection is rather that there are no good reasons for taking only living things to be composite individuals. Whatever features of living things one might wish to use to account for composition, those features will also be found in at least some non-living things. For this reason, the point of demarcation between living and non-living things is vague. Given a clear-cut case of a living thing and a clear-cut case of a non-living thing, we can conceive of a series of extremely similar cases that bridge the two clear-cut ones. Take the cases of some molecules of dirt (clearly non-living) and a single cell (clearly living). We can conceive of a series of cases progressing from some molecules bearing a pattern of causal relations slightly more complex than that of the dirt, to some molecules bearing a pattern slightly less complex than that of the single cell. Now, somewhere in this series, we must draw a line between the non-living and the living; otherwise (contrary to hypothesis) all of the cases will turn out to be non-living after all. However, anywhere we draw that line, there will be a case on the non-living side that is ever so similar to the case on the living side that there will be no reasons for calling the latter a life that do not also apply to the former. Hence the predicate "is living" appears to be vague.7
The "force through which things persevere in their being" is of course the conatus of IIIp6. One worrisome reading of this passage is as saying that only living things possess such a force, in which case (given the connection I have tried to establish between the physics of individuals and the conatus doctrine in Chapter 3) Spinoza would turn out to advocate Organicism. However, the passage is most naturally read in the opposite way, as a firm rejection of the idea that living things have a different metaphysical status than other existing things. In the Ethics, Spinoza does not restrict his discussion of the conatus to living things; and it would be hard to argue, using this passage alone, that Spinoza had previously held such a restricted view of the conatus. I don't think this ultimately poses a difficulty for my reading. 7Van Inwagen bites this bullet, admitting that due to the vagueness of our concept of life, "There can be no right answer to the question, 'When, exactly, did [the xs] begin to be parts of Alice?"' (van Inwagen, 1995, 217). Spinoza cannot accept such vagueness. See the discussion of Spinoza's views on vagueness in Chapter 5.

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The vagueness of the predicate in itself does not sink its use in an account of composition: it is not prima facie incoherent to think that composition is vague, and so the idea that the only composites are living things is not ruled out merely by this fact. However, Spinoza's commitment to the PSR does rule out such accounts. The claim that our distinction between the living and non-living is vague amounts to the recognition that there will always be cases where every reason that could be adduced for counting something as living would also apply to something else that is (by stipulation) non-living. And that is the same as having no reason at all for distinguishing such cases -such distinctions are arbitrary. Spinoza must reject arbitrariness of this sort, so he must reject Organicist accounts of composition. (Alternatively, he could simply claim that all composites are living, but from Spinoza's perspective this would simply illustrate how flawed our idea of life is. Indeed, later in the Ethics, Spinoza goes so far as to reject the idea that there might be any interesting difference between the living and the non-living at all.)8 Spinoza's Theory of Essences & the Incoherence of Universalism In the previous chapter, I worked through the way in which Spinoza's theory of essences is supposed to imply the claim that self-destruction is impossible (j5TIIp4).
8Writing

of the human body, he states:

I understand the body to die when its parts are so disposed that they acquire a diflFerent pattern [rationem] of motion and rest to one another. For I dare not deny thateven though the circulation of the blood is maintained, as well as the other [signs] on account of which the body is thought to be alivethe human body can nevertheless be changed into another nature entirely different from its own. For no reason impels me to maintain that the body does not die unless it is changed into a corpse. (IVp39s) The idea behind these claims seems to be that there is no interesting difference between the living and the non-living. Put succinctly, the difference between a living body and a corpse is no greater than the difference between two living bodies with different natures. To die just is for one's parts to take on a different pattern of causal relations. For this reason, it is of little interest to consider life and death in themselves, on Spinoza's view; if we want insights into such things, we should investigate the concept of patterns of causal relations, not the arbitrary division of those patterns into the living and the non-living.

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The idea, in brief, is this: Suppose an object is the sole cause of its own destruction. According to Spinoza, an object is the sole ("adequate") cause of some effect if and only if the object's essence entails that it produces that effect.9 So if an object's essence entails its own destruction, then the object cannot exist. But, by hypothesis, the object does existit must, if it is to be the cause of its own destruction! This is a contradiction, so the hypothesis that an object is the cause of its own destruction must be false: no object can have to power to destroy itself.10 As with the PSR, the theory of essences at work in this argument turns out to involve claims about what sorts of things exist. Just as the principle of noncontradiction rules out objects that are at once two-footed animals and not two-footed animals, Spinoza takes his theory of essences to rule out objects that at once exist and have the causal power of destroying themselves. The claim that nothing can destroy itself is a necessary condition on existence, and hence it is also a necessary condition on composition. There are a number of accounts of composition that are incompatible with this restriction, but one in particular is worth considering here. The account in question is Universalism: several objects compose another object if and only if they exist.11
& 2. the details of Spinoza's reasoning here, see Chapter 3.3. 11 The many able defenders of Universalism include: (1) David Lewis, in a brief but significant passage from of On the Plurality of Worlds, (Lewis, 1986, 212-3). Lewis's aim is to argue that a ban on "trans-world individuals," individuals with parts in several distinct worlds, would be "unmotivated and gratuitous" in virtue of the fact that composition iuithin a world is unrestricted. While the argument is somewhat tangential to Lewis's main goals, one man's footnote is another man's dissertation. Lewis's argument for unrestricted or universal composition has gained considerable currency in contemporary metaphysics. (2) Ted Sider, who develops a sustained version of Lewis's argument as a way of defending his four-dimensionalist account of persistence (Sider, 2003, 120--32). Unlike Lewis, Sider rests a crucial step of his overall project on Universalism. In order for his argument for four-dimensionalism to get off the ground, Sider needs recourse to individuals composed of arbitrary objects located at different times ("diachronic fusions"). As one might expect, Sider therefore spends a good deal of time fleshing out a Lewis-style argument for Universalism. Since that argument appears to rule out Spinoza's account of compositionindeed, all moderate accounts of compositionI will consider Spinoza's available replies to it in the next chapter.
10For 9IIIdl

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The reasoning behind this account of composition is, roughly, that any restriction upon composition must imply that at least some instances of composition are vague. That is, whenever we demand that several objects bear some relation R in order that they compose an individual, there will be cases where some xs just barely instantiate R and extremely similar cases where some ys just barely fail to instantiate Rso similar may these cases be (the argument goes), there is no good reason to draw the line at the xs rather than the ys. But once we include the ys, we can again come up with an extremely similar case, the zs, that there will be no good reason to exclude. And so on down the line. (This sort of reasoning should be familiar from the foregoing discussion of Organicism. The fault we found with Organicism is one that the advocates of Universalism think can be found with every moderate account of composition.) So rather than demanding that several objects be causally connected, or that they constitute a life, or that they be topologically connected, or what have you, the Universalist requires only that the several objects exist in order that they compose an individual. They simply bite the bullet regarding arbitrary composites: there turns out to be a single individual composed of my nose and the oldest living tree in Sweden. The fact that I have never been to Sweden, that my nose has no salient causal connection with that tree, that the tree's life will be almost completely unaffected by my own existence (let alone that of my nose), these facts do not figure into the question of that object's composition. All that matters are the following questions: Does my nose exist? Does that tree? If so, then there is a single object composed solely of them, intuitions be damned. While Spinoza is certainly not averse to damning our intuitionsbased as they are on the "mutilated and confused" representations of our sense organs (2?IIp40s2)he has principled objections to Universalism. The problem is that according to Univer-

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salism, several objects will compose an individual even when those objects destroy one another. In such cases, the individual that those objects purportedly compose would be the cause of its own destruction, for the composite individual was defined solely in terms of the existence of its parts. When those parts ceased to exist, so goes the composite. But Spinoza's theory of essences rules out self-destruction of this sort. Such individuals would have incoherent essences, so they cannot exist, yet according to the account of composition in question, they would exist. So Spinoza must reject Universalism. This result is interesting in that it reveals a certain tension between Spinoza's adherence to the PSR and his theory of essences. The PSR seems to tell in favor of Universalism, for that account of composition leaves absolutely no room for arbitrary composites. For any existing objects, those objects compose an individual. Adding further restrictions on composition appears to open the door to genuine vagueness if it is a vague matter whether some objects compose an individual, it is a vague matter whether that individual exists. And many have thought that such genuine vagueness, vagueness located not merely in language but in the world itself, is absurd. So Universalism ought to look attractive to those who advocate the PSR, including Spinoza. However, as we have seen, Spinoza's essentialism adds a further restriction upon compositionindividuals cannot be the cause of their own destruction, so several objects cannot compose an individual if those objects would also cause the decomposition of that individual (in the technical, metaphysical sense of "decomposition"). In the case of Universalism, this condition would be violated by some objects whenever one or more of them causes the destruction of one or more of the others. After that destruction occurred, those objects could no longer compose anything, even according to the otherwise profligate Universalist account, for at least one of the composing ob-

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jects would no longer exist. So, again, the account will imply the existence of certain composite individuals that Spinoza's theory of essences forces him to reject.

I should note that my reasoning here is not based on the premise that a composite individual is causally responsible for everything its parts do; call this the transitivity of power over parthood. Admittedly, there are a number of cases in which causal power is transitively preserved: when my hand is holding a pen, I am holding a pen; when the tabletop holds up a lamp, the table holds up a lamp; when the lamp bulb is lit, the lamp is lit. But Spinoza does not appear to think that power is transitive over parthood in all casesto take one interesting example, he seems to think that the parts of the human body sometimes do things that are not in our own interest, but that everything we do is in our own interest.12

Instead, my argument here is based upon the weaker claim that to the extent that the xs are part of an individual, they cannot be responsible for that individual's destruction. And Spinoza should accept this weaker claim. The particular conditions under which the xs compose an individual are part of the essence of that individual, since they will be part of its reason for existing. So, if the xs destroy one another in virtue of their satisfying those conditions, it would follow from the essence of the individual they compose that it destroys itself. This can never happen, on Spinoza's view, but Universalism is committed to the existence of even such composites as these.

TVp60 and 2?IIIp6; taken jointly, these passages suggest a situation in which a part of a human body (the stomach, say) causes that human to desire something that is good for that part, but not for the whole body (the desire to eat the whole cake, say). In such cases, Spinoza seems to be saying that a proper part of the body is overpowering the body as a whole, which I can only make sense of on the assumption that the part has some power that the whole does not possess. This gives us a counterexample to transitivity of power over parthood.

12See

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Spinoza on Existence and Causal Power There is yet a third claim that constrains existence on Spinoza's picture. In order for an object to exist, it must act, and (quite reasonably) in order for it to act, it must exist. To exist just is to have some causal power. Although I will deal with this claim in separation from Spinoza's theory of essences, I should note that it is closely related to that theory. An object is the cause of some effect just when that effect "can be clearly and distinctly understood through" the nature or essence of that object (i?IIId2). What is important at present is simply that for Spinoza, all existing things are things that have causal power, and all things that have causal power also exist.13 As before, Spinoza's claim here might not seem to imply a very strong restriction on composition. It is perfectly compatible with, for instance, Universalism: if everything that exists has causal power, then the sum of several existing objects (whatever they may be) will also have causal powernamely the sum of the causal powers of the several objectsand so it will also exist. However, there are two accounts of composition that are incompatible with Spinoza's claims about existence and causal power. The two accounts, very similar in their motivations, are Nihilism, and Eliminativism. Both of these views are negative: they attempt to account for composition by stating the conditions under which some xs fail to compose an individual. In the case of Nihilism, composition always fails, and there simply are no composite individuals. In the case of Eliminativism, composition fails whenever the (purported) composite individual would have no causal powers over and above the causal powers of its (purported) parts. So the only composite individuals that exist axe those that have emergent causal powers.14 Both views present interesting (and influential) ways of
Chapter 3 of this dissertation. most prominent defenders of Nihilism are Dorr (2005) and Sider (MS). Their arguments for the view, with which I shall not much attempt to engage, lean heavily upon parsimony of
14The 13See

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accounting for composition and parthood, so it is worth seeing why Spinoza must reject them. As I have already suggested, his reasons will be the same in both cases. Against Nihilism Nihilism, again, is the claim that several xs never compose an individual. It is equivalent to the denial that anything has proper parts. There are a number of models that would make such an account of composition true, but the model that seems best to capture the motivation behind it is an atomist picture of the universe: whatever the most fundamental particles at the most basic level of reality are, those particles are the only things that exist. Every feature of the complex objects that appear to be made up of those particles are reducible, without remainder, to the particles themselves. (This is the most intuitive model, I say, but not the only one. Nihilism does not depend on there being mereological atoms, and could just as well be true in a universe that has no fundamental objects or mereological simples; in that case, nothing would exist at all.) Why might someone think that Nihilism is true? After all, it may just seem obvious that in addition to whatever there is at the most fundamental level of reality (assuming there is one), there are also higher, more complex levels. In addition to atoms, there are molecules; in addition to molecules, there are compounds; and so on up a hierarchy of complexity. Although each level seems to depend or supervene upon the levels below it, that is no reason to think that the higher levels don't exist.
metaphysical "ideology". (It is important to recognize that Peter Unger's nihilism is not Nihilism in the sense at issue here. The problem of the many in fact depends upon Universalism being true. Unger's conclusion that he does not exist is based upon the Universalist result that there are innumerable candidate Peter Ungers, each equally qualified for the job, where we generally assume there should be only one (Unger, 1980). Nihilism would head that argument off at the pass.) Merricks (2001) defends Eliminativism at length, first by arguing for Nihilism in cases where we can totally explain the powers of a composite in terms of the powers of its parts, and then by arguing that there are certain cases in which we cannot totally explain the powers of a composite in this way (e.g., in the case of conscious human beings).

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The impetus for Nihilism, though, is to reject exactly this ontologically extravagant intuition. If the phenomena of the world can be fully and completely accounted for by the properties of its most fundamental objects, there is no need to postulate any entities composed out of those objects. By hypothesis, the fundamental objects suffice. Nihilism, then, is supported jointly by two assumptions: First, that every (apparent) complex object depends, for all its properties and relations, upon its parts. Second, that considerations of parsimony urge us to countenance the fewest number of entities, or types of entities, as are needed to completely account for the world's phenomena. Although Nihilism may seem bizarre, these assumptions are fairly popular. The first is held by anyone who does not think that there are any emergent properties in nature. The second is a version of what is often called (perhaps spuriously) "Ockham's Razor," a popular way of distinguishing between competing scientific or metaphysical theories. Together, these assumptions lead us to reject the existence of any composite individuals, i.e., they lead us to Nihilism. Now Spinoza is in a strange position vis-a-vis Nihilism. He accepts the premise that every feature of a composite individual can be totally explained in terms of its parts. He nevertheless rejects the lesson that the advocate of Nihilism wants to draw from that premise, for he takes complex individuals to possess non-fundamental or derivative powers. Although these powers are conferred by, and explained in terms of, the causal relations among that individual's parts, they are nevertheless genuine powers. These derivative powers are distinct from the powers of the parts, for they are not themselves possessed by the parts: they are not identical with the powers of the parts taken singly, nor with the conjunction of the powers of the parts. Spinoza at once denies emergent powers and accepts non-fundamental powers. It is with this sort of reasoning that Spinoza develops a hierarchy of complex material individuals. At the most basic level, there are "the simplest bodies, which

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are distinguished from one another only by motion and rest, speed and slowness" (2s'IIpl3s A2"). Then, in the definition of individuals, he describes complex individuals which are "composed only of the simplest bodies" (.EIIpl3s L7s). Moving on up the hierarchy, Spinoza explains,

But if we should now conceive of another [individual], composed of a number of individuals of different nature[s], we shall find that it can be affected in a great many other ways and still preserve its nature. ... But if we should further conceive a third kind of individual, composed [of many individuals] of this second kind, we shall find that it can be affected in many other ways, without any change of its form. And if we proceed in this way to infinity, we shall easily conceive that the whole of nature is one individual, whose parts, that is, all bodies, vary in infinite ways, without any change of the whole individual, (ibid)

The idea is not that a new power to be affected in many ways is emergent at each level of reality; Spinoza clearly thinks that the capacity to be affected, as well as the capacity to persist through change, are accounted for by activity at lower ontological levels. The idea is simpler than that: there are non-fundamental powers. And in order for there to be non-fundamental powers of the sort Spinoza is describing, there also need to be non-fundamental, complex thingsrecall Spinoza's conflation of causal power with existence. Even though the power of my eye to be affected in many ways is grounded in the powers of, e.g., the rod and cone cells in its retina, it is still a real power. And in order for my eye to have that power, my eye must surely exist. But if even one eye exists, Nihilism is false. Similar arguments militate against Eliminativism, the claim that several xs compose an individual if and only if the xs jointly constitute a consciousness (or any other emergent property).15 This view is roughly halfway between Organicism and
course, it is not obvious that consciousness is an emergent property. But since this is the version of Eliminativism that Merricks develops at length, it is the version that I'll consider here.
15Of

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Nihilism. As with Organicism, it entails that there are no rocks or tables. But, departing from Organicism, neither are there trees, bacteria, or (perhaps) fish. It isn't clear how far up the scale of complexity of living organisms one has to go to find consciousness, so neither is it clear how far up that scale one has to go to find composite inviduals. No matterthe reasoning behind the account is clear enough. Like Nihilism, it is a view motivated primarily by considerations of parsimony. Unlike Nihilism, it dispenses with the assumption that all properties of every macroscopic individual can be reduced to or explained by the properties and relations of their constituent parts. Spinoza must reject this account of composition, and for the same reasons that he rejects Nihilism. According to Eliminativism, there are no derivative powersemergent powers don't count, since by definition they are not wholly explained by an individual's parts. By hypothesis, they are what would be left over as "remainder" in any attempt to reductively account for a complex thing in terms of its parts. So, since Eliminativism rules out derivative powers, Spinoza must reject it. In generaland perhaps surprisingly, given his substance monismarguments from parsimony seem to have no sway over Spinoza. He holds a principle of plenitude that is about as strong as they come:
But to those who ask "why God did no create all men so that they would be governed by the command of reason?" I answer only "because he did not lack material to create all things, from the highest degree of perfection to the lowest;" or, to speak more properly, "because the laws of his nature have been so ample that they sufficed for producing all things which can be conceived by an infinite intellect"... (EI Appendix).

So, whether or not Spinoza countenances emergent properties, he has no time for arguments from ontological parsimony. And this is one of the pillars upon which Eliminativism rests.

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In addition to these reasons for rejecting Eliminativism, I think Spinoza would be quite perplexed by the notion of an emergent power. It does not sit well with his view that a thing's causal powers are essential to it. In Chapter 3, I argued that the causal pattern characteristic to a thing is its actual essence. So if something has a power that cannot be accounted for in terms of the pattern of causal relations among its parts, this would imply, for Spinoza, that the power does not follow from the essence of the thing. But the possibility of an inessential causal power is ruled out by Spinoza's understanding of causal power: something causes an effect to the extent that the effect is explained by that thing's essence. So Spinoza has several reasons to reject Eliminativism. 4.2 What Composition Is I have argued that Spinoza's answer to the special composition question is given by COMPOSITION and explicated by PATTERN. However, it's worth providing a brief, aggregated explanation of how COMPOSITION and PATTERN (the conjunction of which I will for clarity sometimes call "Spinoza's account") satisfies each of these constraints, since these are the necessary and jointly sufficient conditions Spinoza's metaphysics places on composition. Finally, I'll give some positive reasons for accepting Spinoza's account, aside from the fact that it doesn't run afoul of any of the three metaphysical constraints just mentioned. Spinoza's Account and the PSR The principle of sufficient reason imposes the requirement that no parts arbitrarily compose a whole. That is, for any xs, if the xs compose an individual, there is some explanation for their so composing that individual. This, I argued, is why Spinoza must reject Brutalism as well as Organicism. Both of those views involve arbitrary

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composites. But does Spinoza's own account fulfill this requirement? I claim it does, for Spinoza's account has features these other accounts did not. Spinoza's account takes further (albeit derivative) causal powers to be a necessary and sufficient condition for composition, so (1) the presence of such causal powers can always be invoked to explain instances of composition, and (2) it is always a determinate matter whether or not such powers are present. Brutalism did not have the first feature, for it simply assumed that there was no single necessary and sufficient condition on composition. The motivation for this assumption was that mereological relations cannot ultimately be explained by nonmereological ones, those falling outside the "mereological circle" of parthood, overlap, underlap, and so on. Spinoza absolutely rejects this assumption. For Spinoza, mereological relations must be explained in terms of more metaphysically fundamental properties and relationsnamely, causal relations.16 That is why, on Spinoza's view, if some xs compose an individual, it must be the case that the xs are stable with respect to some range of causal structures. This feature of the xs serves to explain their composition. Organicism lacks the second feature, for it is sometimes vague whether or not several objects constitute a life (or a living organism, or what have you). There are borderline cases at which it is indeterminate whether or not the xs compose an individual. So, although the advocate of Organicism can always in principle appeal to a necessary and sufficient condition that explains why several objects compose an individual (if they do), it will not always be the case that the condition determinately applies or does not apply. Whatever answer we gave to the question "Do the xs compose an individual?" would be arbitrary in such cases. Spinoza's account
the Definition of composite individuals after IIpl3s as well as his mention, in Epistle 32, that several objects are parts of a whole to the extent that their natures "adapt themselves to one another".
16Hence

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does not have this problem, since there will always be a determinate answer about whether some xs are stable in the appropriate way. Spinoza's account thus satisfies the demands the PSR places upon it.17

Spinoza's Account and Self-Destruction

Spinoza's theory of essences imposes the requirement that nothing can destroy itself. Spinoza's account can accommodate this requirement by denying that there, are any patterns of causal relations that confer the power of self-destruction. If some ars instantiate a pattern of causal relations, their interaction will ground some further causal powers. Different patterns can confer wildly different powers. But if, for each pattern, we listed off the powers it confers, the power of self-destruction would never appear on that list. We already saw why: patterns are actual essences, and an essence that included the power of self-destruction would be contradictory. So Spinoza has no problem handling this requirement. By contrast, the problem with Universalism was that if just any collection of objects composes an individual, we will have cases where some members of the collection destroy some other members, and thus destroy the whole individual. Spinoza would again object to the incoherence of the essence of any such individual, and hence to Universalism.
Won't it be the case for any predicate whatsoever that we cam conceive of borderine cases? If so, Spinoza's account will also fall prey to arbitrariness. Reply: No, not just any predicate will involve vagueness, on Spinoza's view. If a given predicate denotes a genuine and objective (rather than perspectival) property or relation, the truth or falsity of that predicate will never be vague, for the instantiation of the corresponding property will always be determinate. Since Spinoza takes causal properties and relations to be genuine and objective, and Spinoza's account of composition reduces composition to patterns of causal relations, these issues surrounding vagueness never arise for Spinoza. (See Chapter 5 for a detailed reply to the argument from vagueness against moderate composition.)
17Objection:

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Spinoza's Account and Causal Powers The final relevant claim, fairly straightforward, is that all things that have causal power exist. (Spinoza holds the reverse of this as well, but we do not need it to get at what he would see as mistaken about Nihilism and Eliminativism.) As I have argued, Spinoza further assumes that even if the causal powers of a complex individual can be explained by the powers of its several parts, that does not imply that the powers of the complex individual do not exist. Its powers are, by hypothesis, systematically dependent upon the powers of its parts, but that just means that they depend upon those powers, not that they don't really exist. My interpretation of Spinoza's account is clearly in accord with these requirements, since in order for the xs to compose an individual, the xs must exercise some causal powers upon one another. Even if these causal powers are the only powers the whole individual hasthat is, even if the whole individual has no powers over and above those of its partsthe individual's existence is conditional upon those causal powers. As I noted above, these requirements about causal power rule out Nihilism and Eliminativism for roughly the same reasons. Spinoza thinks that even though the powers of a complex individual depend upon and are explained by the powers of its parts, the powers of the complex individual are nonetheless distinct from the powers of its paxts. Nihilism depends upon rejecting that possibility, that is, it requires that whenever one power can be explained by others, we assume that the dependent power isn't real, or doesn't really exist. Nihilism takes causal powers to "drain down" to the most fundamental ontological level. Whatever causal powers there are, they belong only to whatever mereological atoms there are. Spinoza does not think this otherwise why talk of modes at all? We would need only speak of substance!and so he would reject Nihilism.

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Eliminativism advocates the same view of causal powersthe only powers there axe, axe fundamentalwith the proviso that some complex individuals have emergent causal powers, powers that do not depend upon the powers of their paxts. These emergent powers are not "eliminated" when we sweep away all the explanatorily redundant powers. By contrast, Spinoza does not want to say that the powers of complex individuals are all emergentin fact, he does not want to say that any causal powers are emergent, since he thinks all of the features of complex individuals can be explained by their parts. In any case, Eliminativism, like Nihilism, depends upon causal powers draining, wherever possible, to more fundamental ontological levels. For Spinoza, complex individuals may have non-emergent, non-fundamental causal powers. His account does not rule out this possibility, while both Nihilism and Eliminativism do. 4.3 In Defense of Spinoza's Account of Composition

Having isolated the three claims characteristic to Spinoza's account of composition the PSR, the incoherence of self-destruction, and Spinoza's metaphysics of causal powerlet me now consider ways to defend those three claims, and thereby to defend Spinoza's account. The PSR The PSR is the claim that everything that exists has a reason for its existence. (There are other ways of putting the same idea, but this has the advantage of being very close to the way Spinoza puts it.) The intuitions the principle is intended to capture are easy enough to see. Whatever phenomenon we are faced with, it always seems fair to ask for an explanation of that phenomenon. Even when no explanation

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seems to be forthcoming, it is very common to have faith that there is nonetheless an explanation to be hadan explanation that would be available to us were we more clever, or had we broader knowledge of the context of the phenomenon, or were we not constrained by the limitations of our perceptual apparatus. This, I think, is the motivating intuition behind the PSR. The world is a fundamentally orderly and intelligible place, and everything that happens in it participates in that order. But is the PSR actually a claim that can be defended, or is it ultimately an article of faith? How would one even go about defending such a broad claim? The PSR has fallen on hard times, to be sure; not many would be willing to advocate it publicly. Yet there are a few spirited defenses of the principle that should make it difficult for the analytic metaphysician to simply ignore it completely. Since these defenses have already been worked out at length by others more suited to the task, I'll keep my description brief.18 The strongest defense of the PSR of which I am aware has been presented, perhaps unsurprisingly, by Michael Delia Rocca.19 The argument has something like the following structure: If someone thinks it is acceptable to use arbitrariness as a reason to rule out a metaphysical claim, then that person should also accept the PSR. But everyone does think it's acceptable to rule out a metaphysical claim in virtue of its being arbitrary. So everyone should accept the PSR. It is important to flesh out the first premise, since the connection between arbitrariness and the PSR may not be clear at first. Consider an example of the rejection of a metaphysical claim based upon the judgment that it is arbirary. Delia Rocca
from the argument I focus on here, the best defense of the PSR is provided by Pruss (2006). Although I focus upon Delia Rocca's argument, which I find more intuitively compelling, Pruss's more protracted and wide-ranging defense of the PSR covers a variety of diflFerent arguments against the principle (including the oft-mentioned worry that the PSR is somehow incompatible with quantum mechanics). 19Della Rocca (2010).
18Aside

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discusses a case, first described by Derek Parfit, in which a person { A ) splits into two distinct, fully-functional persons (B and C) that are duplicates of the original person. The process is irrelevantwe might suppose the original person undergoes a process of amoeba-like fissionso long as persons B and C bear the same relations to the original. At this point, we might wonder which of the two new persons A has becomeis it identical with B, or is it identical with CI But by hypothesis, whatever relations A bears to B, it also bears to C. If B has the same genes as A, for example, or has the same memories as A, then so does C. Whatever features of B we might appeal to in judging that A is identical with B, we could just as well use to argue that A is identical with C. So, we are deciding between three options: 1. A is identical with B but not C (or with C but not B ) . 2. A is identical with both B and C. 3. None of the above. But the first option isn't really on the table; it would be unacceptably arbitrary. If A were identical with B but not C, there would be no reason for that fact. So we feel (as Parfit did) forced to go with the third option. Isolated cases of this sort of argument, argument by appeal to the unacceptability of arbitrariness, do not by themselves amount to the PSR. There may be some special features of cases like Parfit's fission that make arbitrariness unacceptable there, though not in the general case.20 Delia Rocca acknowledges this possibility, but points out that we might then ask what these special features are: what is the reason
examples where arbitrariness seems to force us to reject a metaphysical claim: the claim that two objects with the same macrophysical properties could have distinct microphysical properties; the (related) claim that given two people with all the same physical properties, one could be conscious, the other non-conscious; and the claim that there could be two otherwise identical scenarios such that in one of them, some event A causes an event B, but in the other it does not.
20Other

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that arbitrariness is unacceptable in some cases but not others? The question is fair precisely because we have granted that arbitrariness is unacceptable in at least some philosophical contexts. Since it would be arbitrary to suppose, without further explanation, that it is unacceptable only in those contexts, the proponent of the PSR is within his rights to demand a principled reason for the difference. But no principled reason seems to be forthcoming. Arbitrary claims seem in general, or at least in metaphysics, to be unacceptable. And since arbitrary claims are unacceptable, so is the following arbitrary claim: that we can demand a principled explanation for the claim that (as in Parfit's example) one person is identical to another, but not demand an explanation for the claim that a given entity exists. Admitting the unacceptable arbitrariness of the first case pushes us to admit the unacceptability of the latter. But since rejecting the latter case is equivalent to accepting the PSR, we ought to accept the PSR. The argument may appear somewhat weak, at first, given that it simply amounts to shifting the burden of proof onto those who would reject the PSR. However, the burden turns out to be quite a large one. The opponent of the PSR must provide a principled explanation for why arbitrariness is unacceptable in certain philosophical (especially metaphysical) contexts, but not in the case of existence itself. And that is no mean feat. The Incoherence of Self-Destruction Suppose, as Spinoza does, that everything that exists has an essence. The essence has a variety of theoretical uses. It includes all of the properties a thing must exemplify in order to be the sort of thing that it is (by IId2), including the properties marking the cause that generated the thing, as well as those marking the effects the thing will generate (by J^IIIdl-2). Spinoza's theory of essences is, in a pretty direct

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way, an outgrowth of his view that the world is fundamentally orderly and intelligible. The fact that objects bear particular structures by which they can be individuated, the fact that they stand in characteristic sorts of causal relations to other objects, these are facets of the world's intelligibility. Essences are the means by which nature's order is manifest in individuals. I won't attempt to argue for this grand picture of the world as an orderly and intelligible place; and anyway, to some extent that image of the world is just part of what we accept when we accept the PSR. Similarly, I won't attempt here to defend the existence of individual essences. I'll just note in passing that the notion of an individual essence is not nearly so suspect, philosophically or politically, as the notion that, say, a species, race, or gender has an essence. Spinoza does seem to think that there is a human essence, but this view is not invoked at any point in his reasoning about self-destruction.21 So, again, let's assume that everything that exists has an essence. Spinoza thinks that if an object has an essence, it would be incoherent for that object to be the sole cause of its own destruction. Why? Spinoza assumes two premises about what essences include. (Actually, his argument uses an unspecified notion of a metaphysical "definition". But what is really doing the work is his theory of essences, since a thing's definition "posits the thing's essence," IIIp4dem.)22 First, an object's essence explains all of its causal powersperhaps by including all of the properties that confer those powersand, second, all of an object's essential features axe instantiated if and only if that object exists. Given these premises, consider a scenario in which an object destroyed itself. Among that object's causal powers would
f?IVpl8s-37s. This series of propositions makes no sense unless the essences of all humans are identical, or (perhaps) tokens of the same type. Spinoza is characteristically tight-lipped on the details. 22 Again, see Chapter 3 of this dissertation for detailed discussion.
21See

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be included the power of destroying itself. Since the exercise of this power is essential to the objectall of its causal powers are, by the second premiseif it destroys itself, then it exists. But (on any normal interpretation of "destroys") if it destroys itself, it does not exist. Spinoza then concludes that the very notion of self-destruction is incoherent. Anything that would destroy itself must have a contradictory essence, and things that have contradictory essences cannot exist.23 There are, as with any argument, a number of responses and rejoinders that might ensue, even beyond those that I have already discussed. However, the argument is difficult to resist once we have granted that individuals have essences, features that must be present whenever the individual exists, and that an individual's causal powers are among those essential features. Since I think the first premise is just part of a thoroughgoing rationalist view of the world, I'll focus on defending the second premise. Why should we think that an individual's causal powers should be among its essential features?24 Well, consider a potential counterexample. A person is able to raise her arm, absent external defeaters. Is it possible for that very person to be such that she is unable to raise her arm, absent external defeaters? There are a few reasons we might think not, each of which is worth mentioning. The fastest but least likely route to rejecting that possibility is to be a necessitarian about modalityto hold that the actual world is the only possible world. Many have argued that Spinoza is a necessitarian, but this strikes me as a lackluster way to defend the claim that an object's causal powers are essential to it.25 It may be a sound interpretation of Spinoza, but that isn't helpful here. Nobody who opposes the claim that causal powers are essential to their bearers is going to accept necessitarianism.
this see especially 2?Iplldem2. am simply assuming that there are causal powers, and individuals have them. A defense of that premise, interesting and important as it might be, would take me too far afield. 25See especially Garrett (1991); Curley & Walski (1999) provides a useful (but, I think, mistaken) response.
24I 23On

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A slightly better route is to argue that every feature an object has is essential to it, so its causal powers axe too. This view (call it rampant essentialism) entails the rejection of any de re possibilities that axe not also actual: if Sarah actually can raise her hand, it would not be possible for Sarah not to have that ability. (But also: if Sarah's hair is ten inches long, it would not be possible for Sarah not to have hair that long.) However, unlike necessitarianism, rampant essentialism does not rule out any de dicto possibilities. Although it isn't possible for Sarah not to be able to raise her hand, it is possible for an extremely similar counterpart to Saxah not to be able to raise her hand. This view avoids the flattening of modalities from which necessitarianism suffers. However, I still don't think appealing to rampant essentialism is the best way to defend the claim in question. We don't want just any property of an object to be essentialwe want its causal powers to be essential. The strongest route to the conclusion that an object's powers are essential to it seems instead to be something like this: An object's causal powers determine what kind of thing it is, and the kinds to which an object belongs are essential to it. In order for an object to be me, it needs to be human, it needs to be the kind of thing that has a mind and a body, it needs to be the kind of thing that has consciousness, and so on. But each of these kinds are constituted by the possession of certain causal powers, be they internally or externally directed. To be human is for one's parts to have certain structured causal interactions; to be the kind of thing that has a mind and a body is to be able to generate both thoughts and physical effects; to be the kind of thing that has consciousness is to be able to intend some object. Each of these "...is to be able to..." clauses could be replaced by "...is to have the power to..." without change in meaning. There may in certain cases be questions about what these causal powers are acting upon, properly speaking. (Is the object of my power to intend just the object of my intention, the directedness of my mind, or what?) But in each case,

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the subject of the power is clear, as is the relationship between having the power and being a member of a certain kind. Unfortunately there seem to be counterexamples to the claim that an object's powers determine its kinds and its kinds are essential to it. A sharp pair of scissors actually is able to cut a piece of paper. Is it possible for that very pair of scissors to be such that it is unable to cut a piece of paper? Surely it is! That very pair of scissors, after cutting paper has rendered its blades dull, might lose its power to cut paper Here is the problem. Either that causal power is unconnected to any of the kinds of which the scissors are a member, or one or more of the scissors' kinds do in fact depend upon it (perhaps the kind sharp thing), and they are lost when the power is lost. If the former, then an object's powers do not determine its kinds. If the latter, then not all of an object's kinds are essential to it. Either way, the claim is false. In reply, I bite the bullet, and I think Spinoza would too. My options are to say either that the sharp pair of scissors is not identical with the dull pair of scissors, or to say that the the scissors never essentially had the power to cut paper in the first place. The former, while preferable to someone like Leibniz or Van Inwagen who thinks that neither pair of scissors exists, is not a good option for Spinoza. Rather, he would want to batten down a more restricted notion of causal powers such that being able to cut paper is not one. That sounds strange, but remember that what is meant by "causal powers", here, are those abilities that can be explained by an object's essence, by its inmost features and central characteristics. Since the ability to cut paper seems to depend not just on the object's relative sharpness, but on paper's relative frailty, it's not wholly implausible that we wouldn't want to count it as a causal power. What would we say instead? There are several possibilities, but the option that seems best to me is to conditionalize the power in question. Instead of attributing to the scissors

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the power of being able to cut paper, we attribute them the power of being able to cut paper if sharpened. (Obviously we could get more precise than this, but it will do for an example.) So we have an argument for the claim that causal powers are essential to their bearers, and a response to the most obvious difficulty with that claim. But if causal powers are essential to their bearers, then it looks like there is a serious case to be made for Spinoza's dictum that nothing can destroy itself. And this will rule out Universalism as well as most causal accounts of composition that are weaker than Spinoza's. Existence and Causal Power The final claims to consider are (1) that something exists if and only if it has some causal power, and (2) that there are non-fundamental powers. To defend (1) is to defend a brand of nominalism; a thorough job here would take me too far afield from the present topic. (Dorr 2008 has done most of the legwork for me, anyway.) I'll just say this. Hopefully the claim that only existing things have causal power will be uncontentious. The reverse also has a lot to recommend it. If the claim that something exists is to be meaningful, there must be a genuine difference between the scenario in which it exists and the scenario in which it does not exist. But the only difference between such scenarios seems to be that in the one case, the thing generates some effects, changing the world around it, while in the other case it doesn't. Claim (2), however, needs a more extensive defense. Trenton Merricks has validly extended Jaegwon Kim's causal exclusion argument against mental causation to apply to all non-fundamental causes, and this argument demands response from anyone who claims there are non-fundamental causes. Fortunately, though Merricks's extension of the argument is valid, it isn't sound.

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Kim's original argumentintended to show that if mental properties supervene upon or are realized by physical ones, mental causation is impossibleruns as follows. To generate a contradiction, let's suppose that being in some mental state Mi (i.e., bearing a certain mental property) causes some mental state M2. Suppose someone is presently in mental state Mi and physical state Pi, such that Mi supervenes upon or is realized by Pi. This person, because he is in mental state Mi, will then enter another mental state, M2, and since mental states are realized by physical ones, he must therefore enter into another physical state that realizes M2. So being in state Pi causes the agent to enter physical state P2, such that M2 supervenes upon or is realized by P2. So far, so good. The problem is that if mental state M2 is realized by physical state P2, and that physical state is caused by Pi, then we don't seem to need to talk about the initial mental state Mi at all in order to explain why the person comes to be in mental state M2. The ascription of mental properties does no explanatory work at all, but is merely descriptive. The only way Mi could explain M2 is if Mi were able to cause the physical state P2but this obviously runs counter to the physicalist program. We wouldn't want to appeal to irreducible mental causation of physical properties in our physicalist account of mental causation, even if we are non-reductive physicalists! So we seem forced to conclude that mental causation is ruled out as soon as we accept the (apparently modest) premise that mental properties supervene upon or axe realized by physical ones.26 Retooling Kim's causal exclusion argument to target macrophysical causation is very straightforward. Instead of assuming that mental states supervene upon physsay the claim appears modest because (1) this belief seems very popular among philosophers and scientists both, and (2) the claim that mental properties supervene upon or are realized by physical ones is a far cry from the more extreme reductivist claim that there simply are no mental properties.
26I

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ical ones, we assume that macrophysical states supervene upon microphysical ones. Instead of assuming that some mental state can cause some other mental state, we assume that some macrophysical state Mi can cause some other macrophysical state M-z. The rest of the argument is identical: If microphysical states Pi cause microphysical states P2, which realize macrophysical state M2, then Mx can't have been the cause of Mi after all; the microphysical states Pi did the work.27 Merricks's version of the argument detracts from the claim that there are nonfundamental causal powers, because it suggests that what appears to be the work of a non-fundamental power is actually nothing more than the work of numerous fundamental powers. To claim that both kinds of powers exist is explanatorily redundant and metaphysically extravagant: redundant, because we can explain all causal connections by appealing to the fundamental causal powers; extravagant, because the non-fundamental powers are an unnecessary addition to our ontology. Yet there is another way of thinking about the same scenario. Both sides will agree that if there are non-fundamental powers, they are constituted or granted by the fundamental ones.28 But then instead of assuming that the dependence of less fundamental powers upon more fundamental ones lets us dispense with the less fundamental powers, why not assume that we are committed to the fundamental causal powers as well as all the non-fundamental causal powers that they constitute or grant?
as Merricks (2001, 139-146) points out, the case against macrophysical causation is stronger than the case against mental causation. Proponents of mental causation may respond to the causal exclusion argument by claiming that every mental state is identical to a physical one, and then to accept that the first physical state causes the second physical one just is to accept that the first mental state causes the second mental one. The proponent of macrophysical causation cannot make an analogous response, since it would require identifying one thing (the macrophysical state) with many (the underlying microphysical states). Since many-one identity is itself metaphysically suspect, this response does not do much to defend macrophysical causation. 28I am conflating a few different responses to causal exclusion-style arguments. For my rhetorical purposes, the details aren't particularly important: I desire only to show that non-fundamental powers exist, and this is a fairly popular view. For the views under conflation, see Shoemaker (2003) and Pereboom (2002).
27Actually,

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That is, instead of assuming that explanatory redundancy is the deciding factor in whether or not a given causal power exists, we can assume that less fundamental powers are in some sense "inherited" in virtue of more fundamental ones. In fact, the reductivist strategy is rather strange when considered from the point of view of most other ontological arenas. Consider first an example near and dear to Spinoza's heart: the features of a triangle are completely explained by the features of the lines that compose it. Does that mean that there is no triangle? It seems to me that it does not. Colors illustrate the point as well. Nobody thinks that since the property of being green is constituted by a certain relation between the properties of being blue and being yellow, it follows that nothing is green. Some objects axe indeed green, even if there is no fundamental property of being green. Analogously, we should think that there are derivative causal powers even though those powers axe ultimately explained by more fundamental ones. And this is all we need to claim in order to rule out Nihilism and Eliminativism, leaving Spinoza's account untouched. One might worry that this line of reasoning begs the question against Nihilism and Eliminativism, since one of the claims essential to those accounts is that if a proposed element of our ontology is not fundamental, it does not exist. Yet that is precisely what I am claiming is false. However, this dispute only looks questionbegging. Although we disagree on the conclusion that non-fundamental things exist, what we are arguing over is the premise that if something is explanatorily redundant, it should be eliminated from our ontology. I have offered several analogous situations in which we don't seem to think that explanatorily redundant objects or properties (numbers and colors, respectively) ought to be eliminated from the ontology in question. This shifts the burden of proof onto the proponent of Eliminativist-type views: why should explanatorily redundant elements be eliminated? Surely it's possible for

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the world to contain redundancies, after all. The assumption to the contrary stands in need of defense.

Other Motivation for Spinoza's Account So much for the opposition. But some positive motivation for accepting Spinoza's account of composition might still be helpful. Without such motivation, we might just end up in a state of Pyrrhonian ataraxia about composition: all the best theories are false, and Spinoza's theory relies on some weighty metaphysical premises, so we are left without any way of accounting for composition at all. There are, however, several advantages of Spinoza's account that should help to motivate it even if one doesn't accept the PSR or believe in essences. One advantage is that Spinoza's account is moderate. It affirms that several things may, but need not, compose an individual. This is moderation in comparison to two extremes: universalism, according to which several things always compose an individual29; and nihilism, according to which several things never compose an individual.30 On Spinoza's view, two things that do not bear any causal relations to one another do not compose an individual, so he is no universalist. However, he clearly thinks that some things do compose an individualthe parts of the human body, for instanceso he is no nihilist. Moderation is an advantage, here, because it more closely maps to our ordinary conception of composition. The parts of a slab of marble compose a slab because they interact so as to ground the powers of the slab (the power to crush a person, for example). The parts of a sheep compose a sheep
^Sider (2003, 120-139) defends just such a view. ^Sider (MS) defends this alternative. Merricks (2001) defends a similar view which he calls eliminativism, the claim that several things compose an individual iff they have some emergent power. The view sounds similar to what we get from Spinoza's PATTERN, but it isn't: Merricks does not take a table's powers to be emergent in the requisite sense, for instance, and he is agnostic when it comes to the existence of non-conscious living organisms.

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because they interact so as to ground the further powers of the sheep (the power to give birth to other sheep, for example). But the sheep and the slab of marble need not compose a further individual, unless they stand in some causal relations that ground yet further powers. In this sense, even though Spinoza's account is built on strange principles, it delivers us a world that is very recognizablecertainly more recognizable than the universalist's world of arbitrary fusions and the nihilist's world of mereological atoms. Connected to the advantage of moderation is a second advantage: Spinoza's account seems to render its verdicts for the right reasons. The overwhelming majority of what we take to be composite individuals are such that their parts are bound in a pattern of causal relations. It seems to me that the reason our intuitions are what that they are is because of certain expectations we have about composition. We expect that composition involves some manner of causal relation. We can distinguish between cases where several parts look like they compose a whole and cases where they actually do compose a whole. We make such distinctions on the basis of causal relations (or lack thereof) among the parts. This should lead us to hope for a general account of composition in terms of causal relations.31 Yet we also have certain expectations about individuals, expectations to the effect that not all instances of causal relations should be instances of composition. Individuals are the sorts of things that can in principle persist through time, but some causal relations are in principle momentary and vanishing whenever they occur. We seem therefore to recognize that an individual's parts are subject to a complex series of causal connections, but without taking any single one of these causal connections to be constitutive of the individual. The parts of a watch intuitively compose an inMarkosian (1998), who defends ordinary objects but (unlike Spinoza) takes composition to be brute and conceptually primitive.
31Contra

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dividual; yet when any one gear moves another, that fact alone tells us nothing more than that there are two gears standing in a momentary causal relation. All of these observations should urge us toward an account of composition that involves causation, but does not simply identify composition with causation. Spinoza's account of composition fits the bill. As a case in point, consider a sculpture that appears to be a granite sphere, but is in fact two hemispheres positioned very close to one another (in a world without universal gravitation, let's say). The two are not bound in a pattern of causal relations, so on Spinoza's account they would not compose an individual. Nonetheless, we might easily be led to think that they did compose an individual, perhaps because we failed to observe the thin space that separates them, or because we have not yet observed that we could push one without affecting the other. Cases like this, which presumably an account like Brutalism would want to count as composition, are cases where we have grounds for thinking our intuitions err. Such cases are not reasons to modify our account of composition, since the proposed account fits perfectly well with the basis by which we decided that the hemispheres composed an individual: we thought the two hemispheres stood in a pattern of causal relations! Our intuitions here conflict,, not with Spinoza's account of composition, but with the fact that there turned out to be no pattern of causal relations binding them together. Conclusion In this chapter, I considered how other accounts of composition fared in terms of three central metaphysical principles maintained by Spinoza: the PSR, the incoherence of self-destruction, and his account of (non-fundamental) causal powers. I showed that each of the best candidate accounts of composition contradict at least one of Spinoza's three principles. I then showed that Spinoza's own account of com-

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position is (unsurprisingly!) consistent with each of the three principles. Finally, I presented some reasons for thinking that Spinoza's three principles are true: the PSR is presupposed by a standardly accepted style of analytic argumentation; the incoherence of self-destruction looks correct given that an individual's causal powers are essential to it; and the existence of non-fundamental powers is born out by the ways we ordinarily think about fundamentally in a variety of contexts. Given that these three principles are true, we have a laundry list of candidate accounts of composition that are false. Spinoza's account remains a contender, however, and so I mentioned a few positive reasons for accepting Spinoza's account, emphasizing its success at mapping to our intuitions. Given the high level of abstraction at which the debate about composition takes place, I think this is about as good a case for an account of composition as can be made. There are good reasons for accepting Spinoza's account, there are good reasons for rejecting each other candidate, and our intuitions match Spinoza's account far more closely than they match any other candidate. I have now explained what I take Spinoza's account of composition to be, why I think he advocated it, and why it merits consideration as a serious candidate account of composition even today. In the chapter that remains, I will consider the strongest principled argument against the accountthe argument from vagueness. Before moving on to this argument, it must be noted: Every candidate account of composition is subject to objections, every account fails to satisfy some of our intuitions. My aim has not been, and will not be, to show that Spinoza's account is immune to objection or that it satisfies our every intuition. My aim has been to argue that Spinoza has provided us with the best candidate account of composition to dateand this in spite of the fact that he was writing in the mid-seventeenth century, prior even to the advent of Newtonian physics, and without the benefit of an understanding of formal

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logic. If I have filled in gaps, they are gaps that he himself could easily have filled in given access to our wealth of philosophical, logical, and physical knowledge. Let's turn now to see how Spinoza, properly armed, might reply to the standard contemporary argument against moderate composition.

Chapter 5

Spinoza on Vagueness and Degrees of Composition

I have presented my interpretation of Spinoza's account of composition, explained the metaphysical premises in which that account originates, and provided historical and philosophical arguments in its favor. In this chapter, I will consider a recent and powerful argument against Spinoza's accountindeed, against all moderate accounts of compositionthe argument from vagueness. My intention in this final chapter is not only to show how Spinoza could respond to the argument from vagueness, however, but to clarify some of the nuances of Spinoza's view. The argument from vague existence is designed to topple all moderate accounts of composition, thereby motivating either Universalism or Nihilism about composition. The argument works by showing that any moderate restriction on composition will either result in vagueness or arbitrary sharp cutoffs between very similar cases. I will argue that though Spinoza accepts many of the premises of this argument, he is able to avoid its conclusion. He rejects the possibility of genuine vagueness in the world, but he provides principled grounds for any sharp cutoffs his account would draw between otherwise similar cases. It is important to distinguish the claim that composition is vague from the claim that composition admits of degrees, however. Although I will argue that Spinoza cannot accept vague composition or vague existence, it seems that he does take both composition and existence to admit of degrees. Indeed, the notion of existence by degrees plays a crucial role in the overarching project of Spinoza's Ethics: since existence and causal power are one and the same, and power and virtue are one and

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the same, Spinoza is able to infer that being virtuous entails having a higher degree of existence. If the notion of existence by degrees is nonsense, though, then so is Spinoza's gloss on virtue as its own reward. Fortunately for Spinoza, the account of composition I have attributed to him gives us a nice way of understanding his conception of degrees of existence. I begin by considering the argument from vagueness as it applies to Spinoza's account of composition. The argument fails because Spinoza's metaphysical picture leaves him room for principled sharp cutoffs (to use the contemporary idiom). I then turn to Spinoza's notion of existence by degrees. After arguing that existence by degrees is (conceptually) possible, I show how Spinoza's account of composition makes room for it. Parts can compose wholes to greater or lesser degree, on Spinoza's view; the greater their degree of unity, the more similar the whole individual is to substance. 5.1 The Argument from Vagueness In recent debates about the special composition question from Lewis (1986, 21213) onward, one of the litmus tests that has been used to rule out accounts of composition is to argue that the account entails the possibility of vague existence. The possibility of it being genuinely vague whether something exists is troubling to contemporary metaphysicians, for it is popular to locate vagueness in language rather than in the world.1 It seems fine to say that it can be (and often is) vague what is meant by a certain word or sentence; we might even think that the predicate "exists" is vague in its meaning. But it seems unacceptable to cross the line from language to world and say that existence itself is vague. My meaning might be vague when I assert, "Sam is over there," but it had better not be vague whether or not Sam
^ee, e.g., van Inwagen 1995, 231-3; Markosian 1998, 222-3; Sider 2003, 127-32

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in fact occupies some particular location at some particular time. The names and predicates of our language may be fuzzy, but the objects, properties, and relations of the world are fixed. Call this the linguistic theory of vagueness; call its denial the theory of genuine vagueness or vagueness in the world. Based on the linguistic theory of vagueness, we can reject any account of composition according to which it is vague whether or not some objects compose an individual. For if it is vague whether some xs compose y, then it is vague whether y exists. But it cannot be vague whether something exists, so the account must be false. Now, it would be anachronistic to call Spinoza a proponent of a "linguistic theory of vaguenesshe would likely describe the phenomenon in terms of the representational content of ideas admitting vagueness. However, I will argue that Spinoza, like the proponents of the linguistic theory, would reject the possibility of genuinely vague existence. He would likewise reject any account of composition that entailed the possibility of vague existence or vague composition. It is worth heading off one objection at the pass. Spinoza often allows for things to bear properties and relations by degrees, including a thing's "reality".2 Indeed, the Ethics is liberally peppered with the phrases "insofar as" and "to the extent that", modifiers applied to various property ascriptions to indicate that the property in question is not ascribed absolutely, but only to a certain degree.3 However, to say that something admits of degrees is not to say that it is vague. Indeed, if a thing bears a property to a certain degree, then it can't be vague whether or not it bears that property. It bears the property, albeit more than some things and less than others. All of which is just to say that Spinoza seems to allow that things can bear properties by degrees, but that is not evidence that he countenances genuine vagueness.
2See 32?Ipl3c;

TId6; cf. the use of that definition in i?Vp40dem. Ipl5s; Ip22; IIp5-6; IIIpl; IIIp5-6; IVpl-2; IVp8; IVpl4; IVp37dem; et al.

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Of course, this alone is not sufficient to establish that Spinoza rejects genuine vagueness. However, I think there is a simple argument that Spinoza's system does not have room in it for vague existence. The argument I have in mind is that the vagueness of the existence of modes would imply vagueness of the existence of the substance in which they inhere, which is clearly ruled out by Spinoza's metaphysics. Whatever exists, Spinoza tells us, "expresses the nature or essence of God in a certain and determinate way" (f?Ip36dem, my emphasis; cf. Ip25c). So if it is genuinely vague whether something exists, it is vague whether it expresses the essence of God in a certain and determinate way. But it makes no sense to say that it is vague whether something is certain and determinatethe concept of vagueness stands in opposition to the concept of determinacy. Something is certain and determinate, for Spinoza, when its existence is fixed and bounded in a particular way (presumably by limitations or weaknesses involved in its essence). So if it is vague whether something expresses the essence of God in a certain and determinate way, then it doesn't express the essence of God in a certain and determinate way. By modus tollens, we can again infer that the purported vaguely existing thing simply does not exist. Therefore, given Spinoza's metaphysical picture, vague existence is impossible.4 Now, if Spinoza accepts that vague existence is impossible, his account of composition had better not entail the possibility that it is vague whether some things compose an individual. This is where the argument from vagueness comes into the picture. The argument from vagueness is meant to show that no moderate account
worry about this latter argument is that Spinoza does not always use 'determinate' to mean the opposite of 'vague'. Sometimes he uses it as the opposite of 'eternal', in the sense that a thing with determinate existence is bounded or limited in its existence. For instance, at 2?Ip28dem, he places that which "is finite and has a determinate existence" in opposition to that which is "infinite and eternal". The worry is that if we take the negation of the property of being finite/determinate to be the property of being infinite/eternal, we cannot also take the negation of the finite/determinate to be the vague/indeterminate. Substance exists, full stop. However the relevant passage at 'Ip36dem does not seem to be invoking this sense of "determinate"he is there appealing to the similarity between modes and substance, not the difference between them.
4One

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of composition can be correct, for any restriction on composition will imply the possibility of vague existence.5 Although originally presented by Lewis (1986, 212-13), the argument has been usefully reformulated by Sider (2003, 120-32) as follows: If not every class has a fusion, then we can consider two possible cases, one in which composition occurs and another in which it does not, which are connected by a 'continuous series of cases' selected from different possible worlds, each extremely similar to the last. Since composition can never be vague, there must be a sharp cut-off in this series where composition abruptly stops occurring. But that is implausible. So composition always occurs. (122) The basic idea is to generate something like a sorites paradox about composition6: we take a case where composition occurs and a case where it doesn't, then come up with a continuous series of cases that bridges two, ordered by similarity from the success case to the failure case. Any restriction on composition will result in a shaxp cut-off between two of the bridging cases, such that in one of them composition occurs and in the other it fails to occur, in spite of their extreme similarity in all relevant respects. The intuition at work in the argument is that such sharp cut-offs are unforgivably arbitrary, and for that reason should not be accepted as part of our metaphysics. We can expand on this basic idea as follows. Consider a moderate account of composition according to which some xs compose an individual if and only if the xs satisfy a given condition, C. Because the account of composition in question is moderate, we know that there will be at least one case in which some xs satisfy condition C (and therefore compose an individual) and at least one case in which
of composition include any account on which it is possible but not necessary that some xs compose an individual. Generally speaking, this will include any account of composition except Nihilism and Universalism. 6I say "something like a sorites paradox" because it is crucial to the argument that we cannot appeal to vagueness to resolve the problem. With the predicates typically implicated in sorites paradoxes"is a heap" or "is bald," for instancewe can resolve the paradox simply by noting that these predicates are vague. (We might reasonably want an account of vague predicates, but we don't need one to resolve the paradox.) This tactic cannot be applied to the case of composition, for the vagueness of composition would imply genuine vagueness, vagueness in the world rather than merely in language.
5 Moderate accounts

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some xs fail to satisfy C. Let's say the Xis satisfy C and the a;2s fail to satisfy it. Now consider a continuous series of cases generated by the following requirements: (1) each case is relevantly similar to the is or the x2s with respect to C; (2) given any two cases (including the Zjs and x2s), there is another case that is relevantly similar to both with respect to C. These requirements give us the structure of a continuous series of cases, ordered by similarity, bridging the xjs and the x2s. Now, each such case will either satisfy C or fail to satisfy it. (It must be supposed that the condition on composition is not inherently vague, else the account would be unacceptable from the start.) Since (1) implies that the bridging cases can be ordered relative to their similarity to the Xis and x2sand specifically ordered according to similarity in the respects relevant to compositionthere will be a first case that fails to satisfy C, and every subsequent case will also fail to satisfy it; call this first failure case the x^s. Additionally, (2) implies that there will also be a case between the rris and the XbS, a case relevantly similar to both. And (2) can be iterated to get cases more and more similar to the a^s. Suppose we apply (2) until we eventually get a case that is very similar to the Xf,s in all relevant respects; call this bridging case the z0s.7 All of this sets up the following conclusion. Since the xi,s are the first case that fails to satisfy condition C, the xas therefore satisfy it. So the xas compose an individual and the X(,s don't compose anything. But we have picked the xas so that they are almost indistinguishable from the xbs in the respects relevant to composition. To say that the xas compose something and the X(,s do not is therefore counterintuitive, for it seems that the line between them is somehow arbitrary. This arbitrariness can even
7More

visually:

XJS, XJS,..., XAS, XbS,..., x'2s, X2S

The xas and the i&s are extremely similar cases but the former compose an individual while the latter do not.

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be exaggerated further by pointing out that there is yet another case between the xas and the x^s, a case still more similar to the X{,s, and even this case will compose something although the x^s do not. Since a guiding principle in metaphysics is to avoid drawing arbitrary lines in the ontological sand whenever possible, we should avoid the arbitrariness involved in positing such sharp cut-offs with respect to composition. But such cut-offs can be generated for any moderate account of composition. The argument did not depend upon any particular features of the condition C, only on the premise that some cases satisfied it and others failed to do so, and that we could develop a continuous series of cases between those two poles. The conclusion, Lewis and Sider urge, is that we should not accept any moderate account of composition. So goes the argument from vagueness; an example helps make the conclusion clear. Suppose we have before us a knitted sweater, an object that (let's say) clearly satisfies our intuitive criteria for a composite individual. We can imagine the same sweater completely unraveled into several long strings of yarn, objects that (let's say) fail to compose anything. The argument contends that given these two cases, we can further imagine the sweater at some intermediate point in the unraveling process, say with one sleeve undone and the rest of the sweater intact. In this intermediate case, a bridging case between clear composition and clear non-composition, do the strings of yarn compose anything? Let's say for the sake of argument that we decide the strings do still compose an individualperhaps not a finished sweater anymore, but something, anyway. The argument continues: between the one-armed sweater and the fully unraveled one, we can imagine another intermediate case. If we continue to pull loose the strings of yarn in the sweater, we at some point unravel half of the sweater. Again we must ask wether the strings of yarn still compose an individual in this case. Again we decide that they do, albeit with some hesitation. The argument then continues with yet another bridging case, even less clear than the last.

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A.t some point during this process, the argument contends that we will arrive at a case that is very similar to the pieces of yarn from the fully unraveled sweater (which does not compose anything), but that is also very similar to the pieces of yarn in the partly unraveled sweater (which does). In such a case, the argument has it, whatever reasons we could give for thinking that composition occurs, we would have equally good reasons for thinking that it does not. Because of this, any decision between the two possibilities would be completely arbitrary; one might as well choose at random. However, such arbitrary classifications are extremely unlikely to map to the joints of the world. If your metaphysical theory calls upon you to make arbitrary decisions of this sort, that is generally a sign that your metaphysical theory is wrong. Based on this, the argument concludes, we should not accept any moderate account of composition. They will all demand arbitrariness of the sort that an honest philosopher should avoid. In the case of Spinoza's account of composition, the argument from vagueness is instantiated as follows. Given some things that instantiate a pattern of causal relations, we can also conceive of those same objects failing to instantiate such a pattern. The first case is a case of composition, so I'll call it the success case; the second is a case of non-composition, so I'll call it the failure case. Next, imagine a series of bridging cases connecting the success case to the failure case. Because Spinoza's account of composition relies on the notion of a pattern of causal relations, there are two ways in which the success case could be made more similar to the failure case: the first possibility is a bridging case in which the causal relations axe weaker than they axe in the success case; the second possibility is a bridging case in which the causal relations are less patterned than they are in the success case. Both of these ways of varying the success case give us a new case that stands between success and failure. Both ways of varying the success case can be iterated to develop a continuous

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series of such cases that bridges the success case and the failure case. For each case in such a bridge, we need to make a decision: do the several things instantiate a pattern of causal relations? Suppose we say yes. Then we can select another bridging case, slightly closer to the failure case, and ask the question again. In either series, either at the end of the line or slightly before it, we will at some point arrive at a case that Spinoza's account calls a failure. But given that the series is continuous, we will be able to come up with a success case that is extremely even arbitrarilysimilar to the failure case. The account therefore draws a sharp cutoff between the two cases, a cutoff that is arbitrary and brute. The proponent of the argument from vagueness wants to conclude from this that Spinoza's account of composition is bad. It is guilty of a kind of metaphysical treason, for it secretly harbors the inexplicable. Although one might worry about the anachronism of applying the argument from vagueness to Spinoza's work, the accusation is not an idle one; it strikes at the core of Spinoza's philosophy. If Spinoza had thought that his proposed account of composition would force him to admit an arbitrary and inexplicable distinction contradicting his naturalism and his rationalismhe surely would have rejected the account. He would at the very least have felt compelled to address the issue. I agree that it is an anachronistic concern in that the argument from vagueness leans heavily upon the logic of the continuous series and total orderings, which logic was not available in Spinoza's day. In spite of this, I say Spinoza's metaphysical theory comes furnished with the resources to block the argument from vagueness. Indeed, there are a number of ways to avoid the conclusion of the argument, even for someone like Spinoza who does not accept the possibility of vague existence. Each premise of the argument may of course be denied, but there are two steps that are particularly vulnerable. One of these premises, however, Spinoza cannot deny; the other, he

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must. It is worth examining both possibilities, for both shed some light on Spinoza's metaphysics. The ultimate conclusion of the argument is based on the undesirability of arbitrariness in a metaphysical theory. The alternative, Sider tells us, is "extremely implausible; one would need to admit a pair of cases exactly alike in terms of causal integration, qualitative homogeneity, and so on, but which differ over whether objects have a sum" (Sider, 2003, 122). In other words, facts about composition would be brute facts, facts without explanation.8 But don't we need to admit brute facts at some point in our metaphysics? The explanatory chain needs to bottom out somewhere, one might argue, and facts about composition seem to be pretty fundamental, as these things go. After all, facts about composition ground some of the most basic facts about our ontologythe number of things that exist, as well as most of the ontological dependence relations that those things bear to one another, are determined by facts about composition. We might for this reason simply take composition to be metaphysically primitive and therefore brute, inexplicable. Spinoza, of course, must reject this possibility. Facts about composition cannot be brute because no facts are brute. This goes hand in hand with Spinoza's strict rationalism"For each thing there must be assigned a cause, or reason, both for its existence and for its nonexistence" (Mplldem). In particular, if facts about composition were brute, then facts about the existence of composite individuals would be brute. But facts about the existence of composite individuals must, by Spinoza's strong PSR, be grounded in a "cause, or reason". Falling back upon brutal composikind of brute composition I am considering here is such that facts about composition do not supervene upon causal or qualitative facts. Markosian (1998) argues for a weaker form of brute composition, namely the claim that "there is no true, non-trivial, and finitely long answer to [the special composition question]" (214). Sider has designed this version of the argument from vagueness to address the weaker version of brute composition, but not the stronger version (since he takes it to be so implausible as not to need attacking).
8The

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tion is not an option for Spinoza. There is another way to resist the argument from vagueness, however, that does not conflict with Spinoza's rationalism. The argument crucially relies upon the claim that the sharp cutoff between two very similar cases must be arbitrarythat we can generate a success case and a failure case that are "exactly alike in terms of causal integration, qualitative homogeneity, and so on". This is supposed to be guaranteed by the fact that the two cases are ever so similar in the respects relevant to composition, so that we could give no satisfactory reason for saying that in one case composition occurs, while in the other it fails to occur. The sharp cutoff between the two cases is portrayed as a distinction without a difference. The proponent of restricted composition can reject this portrayal by arguing that in spite of the extreme similarity between the two cases, there will be a relevant difference between them that grounds the cutoff. This is the path Spinoza ought to take, I think, and it is a path that his metaphysical theory leaves open for him. If we want to defend the account, we need to show that the sharp cutoffs it draws between extremely similar cases are grounded in differences that are relevant to Spinoza's account of composition. I think such a defense can be mounted using the resources of Spinoza's metaphysics. Since Spinoza's account places two distinct restrictions on composition, the account must be defended on two charges of arbitrariness. First, I'll appeal to COMPOSITION to argue that the sharp cutoff between objects that are very weakly causally related and objects that are not at all causally related is a principled cutoff. Second, I'll appeal to PATTERN to argue that the possession of derivative causal powers grounds the sharp cutoff between several things that instantiate a pattern of causal relations and several things that do not instantiate such a pattern.

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Causal Relations The first kind of sharp cutoff that might be thought to indict Spinoza's account of composition is between a case where some things instantiate a pattern of very weak causal relations and another case where some things, otherwise extremely similar to the things in the first case, are not causally related to one another at all.9 For example, imagine two tennis balls connected by a very thin, frayed tether. These tennis balls communicate their motions to one another, albeit very weakly. It would take very little causal power to interfere with their pattern of causal relations. We could even fill out the imagined scenario by stipulating that the tether connecting the tennis balls is so thin that if one of the balls were picked up, the tether would break. Even so, Spinoza's account seems to entail that the connected tennis balls compose an individual, for it seems that they instantiate a certain pattern of causal relations. The oddity of this conclusion is made manifest when we consider an extremely similar case where two tennis balls were once connected by a frayed tether, but the last strand connecting them breaks, so that either ball can now be moved without communicating that motion to the other. Let the tennis balls in the second case be exact duplicates of those in the first case, with the exception of that last strand of tether. Nevertheless, Spinoza's account tells us that in the first case, the tennis balls compose an individual, whereas in the second case they do not. The proponent of the argument from vagueness winces at drawing such a sharp metaphysical distinction between two such incredibly similar cases. But Spinoza has his reasons for drawing such a distinction, in spite of the strong
is the concern cited by Lin (2005, 252 & fn. 31). Of Spinoza's definition of individuals, Lin writes, "Clearly the concept of motions being systematically reated is a vague one. Consequently, any concet of complex individuality built out of it will [inherit] its vagueness." The concept of motions being systematically related will turn out to admit of degrees, for Spinoza, but this does not mean it is vague. I have already shown why Spinoza cannot afford to countenance vagueness of this sort.
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similarity between the two cases. The frayed tether connecting the imagined tennis balls is significant because it implies a causal connection between the two balls, in that moving one of them will cause a change in the other as well. The relationship between causal relations and conceptual ones in Spinoza's metaphysics is, I think, the reason that he takes causal relations to be so important in determining whether several things compose a unified whole.10 The following principle seems to be motivating Spinoza's conception of composition: insofar as distinct things instantiate a pattern of causal relations, to that extent they mutually explain one another's states. This is the sense I want to impute to Spinoza's discussion of parthood in Ep. 32, where he claims that several things are parts of the same whole to the extent that their natures adapt to one another. If several things instantiate a pattern of causal relations, then their natures or essences are "adapted" to one another in that the explanation of the state of any one of those things will involve some appeal to states of the others. If an object stands in such a pattern of causal relations, trying to conceive of that object without considering the others in the pattern will result in a hopelessly partial and fragmented picture of it. Owing to their conceptual interdependencewhich Spinoza thinks is implied by their causal interdependencethe several objects are properly understood as a unified whole. By contrast, if some distinct objects do not instantiate a pattern of causal relations, they are not conceptually unified in a way that could explain or ground their composing one individual, so Spinoza must conclude that they do not compose anything.11 Let's return to our main discussion, especially the apparent problem that confronts
discussion of the connection between causal and conceptual relations, see Chapter 4.1, "Spinoza's PSR and Arbitrary Existence," in this dissertation. 11 Having emphasized the dependence of the parts upon one another, I also want emphatically to deny that this means that the parts depend upon the whole. It only implies that the parts depend upon each other. I gave my reasons for reading Spinoza as denying that a whole is prior to its parts in Chapter 2.
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Spinoza when he draws a sharp distinction between the case where some objects are very weakly causally related and another case involving very similar counterparts of those objects that are not causally related at all. In the former case, he takes the objects to compose an individual, while in the latter case he does not. Spinoza can justify this sharp cutoff between extremely similar cases by appealing to a certain notion of composition, a notion according to which what it means for some things to compose an individual is that those things are conceptually interdependent in the manner outlined above. By contrast, in the absence of a pattern of causal relations binding them together, objects are conceptually independent. But whenever several things are conceptually independent, they cannot compose an individual, at least given the notion of composition just described. So some objects compose an individual only if those objects bear stable causal connections to one another, and this explains the sharp cutoff between cases involving weak causal connection and cases involving no causal connection. Patterns The second kind of sharp cutoff that Spinoza needs to explain is between cases in which some causal relations constitute a pattern and cases in which they do not. On my interpretation, Spinoza is committed to saying that the objects compose an individual in the former case but not the latter. The problem is that somewhere in the continuous series of cases just envisaged, there will be a pair of cases that are extremely similar in almost every respect, but that differ with respect to composition. Spinoza has an easy response available to this line of argument. We are imagining two extremely similar cases, one in which several things instantiate a pattern of causal relations, and another in which several things merely instantiate some causal relations (but not a pattern). In order to provide a principled ground for distinguishing the two

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cases, we need some feature that is both (1) relevant to composition and (2) present in the first case and absent in the second. PATTERN gives us just such a feature. In the first case, by hypothesis, the several things instantiate a pattern of causal relations; it follows from PATTERN that their interactions ground some further causal power. In the second case, by hypothesis, the several things fail to instantiate a pattern of causal relations. Since PATTERN is a biconditional, they must also fail to ground any further causal powers. So we have pinpointed a feature that is present in the first case and absent in the second case. The principled ground for our distinction between the two cases is that in the success case, the causal relations in question confer some further causal power upon the things that instantiate those relations. Why is this principled? Due to the material equivalence between existence and causal power, the presence of further causal power entails existence, and its absence entails nonexistence. The proponent of the argument from vagueness might try to run the same line of reasoning again on the condition of having further causal power. That is, she might demand that we account for the difference between two extremely similar cases, one in which several things interact so as to ground some further causal power, and another case in which they do not. But this is easy to nip in the bud. Spinoza can simply admit that power admits of degree, and then say that anything that has any degree of power exists. This blocks the premise that there is a continuous series of cases between the success case and the failure case. In sum, then, Spinoza can justify the sharp cutoffs his account draws between cases where composition occurs and cases where it fails to occur, even if those cases are otherwise very similar. To the extent that the proponent of the argument from vagueness also endorses the linguistic theory of vagueness, she cannot attack Spinoza for grounding composition in patterns of causal relations, since neither causation nor powers are vague.

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In fact, the response that I've developed here highlights a general shortcoming of the argument from vagueness.12 My approach (on Spinoza's behalf) has been to provide principled reasons for accepting certain sorts of sharp cutoffs between cases of composition and cases of non-composition. Proponents of the argument usually advocate a linguistic theory of vagueness. That's why the argument has such a destructive payoff: vagueness in the world is assumed to be absurd. But that assumption suggests that proponents of the argument would also accept another claim: there are non-vague properties and relations. If this claim is granted, though, we can always use those non-vague properties and relations to construct a moderate account of composition. By hypothesis, such a moderate account would not force us to accept vagueness in the world, and any sharp cutoffs will be grounded in the properties and relations that underwrite the account. Indeed, we could provide an account that appears to be moderate, but that is extensionally equivalent to Universalism. Suppose we take the (admittedly rather unnatural) property of being such that 2+2=4 to explain composition. That is, suppose our answer to the special composition question is: some xs compose an individual if and only if each of the xs is such that 2+2=4. Then it will follow that any xs whatsoever compose an inividual, so this account will be extensionally equivalent to Universalism. But it has the same structure as a moderate account of compositionthat is, it uses a certain property of the xs as a way of distinguishing cases of composition from those of noncomposition. The argument from vagueness ought to apply to it, then. Obviously, though, the proponent of Universalism would be perfectly right to reply, "But that property does not admit of vagueness, it is
approach I've used here is discussed schematically by Korman (2010), who provides a list of all the different ways one could resist the argument from vagueness. Although Korman does not specifically discuss using causal relations as a way to ground composition in a non-vague natural relation, he clearly has in mind natural properties and relations of that sort.
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as determinate as any property can be. Any so-called sharp cutoffs it resulted in would be principled ones." My point is that the same reply will be available for any account that grounds composition in certain non-vague properties or relations. Spinoza's account fits the bill. 5.2 Composition by Degrees

There is another worry that might be raised by the proponent of the argument from vagueness. One of the reasons that vague existence seems so bad is that, intuitively, existence is a binary propertya thing either exists, or it fails to exist, and there is no middle ground. But Spinoza's account, though it does not entail vague existence, seems to entail that there are degrees of existence. Why? In my response to the argument from vagueness, I placed a great deal of weight on the material equivalence between existence and causal power, and this allowed me to provide a principled ground for the sharp cutoffs between cases of composition and cases of non-composition. But I also relied on the claim that, for Spinoza, causal power admits of degrees. So one might worry that in warding off vagueness, I have accepted a thesis just as pernicious: since causal power admits of degrees, and causal power is coextensive with existence, existence too admits of degrees. Although I do indeed think Spinoza is committed to degrees of existence, I do not think that thesis is actually entailed by his view that causal power admits of degrees. That is, I reject the inference from the premises that (a) causal power admits of degrees, and (6) causal power is coextensive with existence, to the conclusion that (c) existence admits of degrees, even though I think Spinoza accepts all three claims as true. I reject this inference because it seems possible for causal power to be coextensive with existence in the sense that everything that has any degree of causal power exists. Then (a) and (b) could both be true even though existence does not

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admit of degrees. This is important for my purposes because it means that even those whose intuitions about existence are unadventurous should be able to accept Spinoza's account of composition. The view entails neither that existence is vague nor that existence admits of degrees. It is worth dwelling on this point because I have made heavy use of a series of conditionals and biconditional that might seem to entail that existence and composition both admit of degrees. I have relied upon the trivial claim that (1) If has some causal power, then x exists, but I have also relied upon its reverse, (2) If x exists, then x has some causal power. I have elsewhere relied on (3) If some a:s compose y, then y exists. Now in my response to the argument from vagueness, I have relied upon the claim that (4) Causal power admits of degrees. The problem (if it is a problem) is that someone might think that if possession of one predicate entails a second, and the second predicate is graded, then the first predicate must be graded as well. That is: (5) For any P and Q , if \ f x ( P x degrees. Q x ) , and Q admits of degrees, then P admits of

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As justification for (5), someone might say, "You have claimed that P is sufficient for Q, that is, the manifestation of P provides a kind of logical explanation for the manifestation of Q. So if Q admits of degrees, then our explanation for the degree of Q must to appeal to P. And the only way this appeal to P will make sense is if P, too, admits of degrees." If (5) were true, then it would follow from (2) and (4) that existence admits of degrees. And it would follow from (2), (3), and (4) that composition admits of degrees. However, I deny (5)I think the reasoning behind (5) is confused from top to bottom. The central error is in the assumption that, just because Px is sufficient for Qx, it must also be sufficient for the particular degree to which x is Q. But this is wrong. The sufficient condition for the bare presence of Q need not be a sufficient condition for any particular degree of Q. (Indeed, the notion that logical sufficient conditions are "explanations" seems misguided in any case. As relevance logicians love to point out, the classical conditional is not informative enough to provide such explanationsif the sky is blue, then 2 + 2 = 4, but does that really tell us anything about the connection between meteorology and arithmetic?) So in spite of the fact that Spinoza's account of composition would require him to accept (1) - (4), those commitments do not entail that either composition or existence are graded. Nonetheless, as I said, Spinoza has other reasons for thinking that existence and composition do admit of degrees, and one interpretive virtue of the account of composition I have attributed to him is that the view gives us a useful way of understanding his conceptions of graded composition and existence. For Spinoza, something has a degree of existence corresponding to its degree of causal power. When we are more virtuous, knowledgeable, and powerfulidentical notions, on Spinoza's viewwe exist to a greater degree. As our virtue, knowledge, or power wanes, our very existence

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wanes with it.13 But how axe we to make sense of these degrees of existence? I claim that, for Spinoza, an individual's degree of existence tracks its degree of composition, and its degree of composition is the degree to which its parts act to promote its composition. This claim needs some unpacking. Let me draw out Spinoza's reasons for thinking that an individual's degree of existence is its degree of causal power. Spinoza claims that "God's power is his essence itself" (Ip34), and "God's existence and his essence are one and the same" (Tp20). It follows that existence and causal power are identical, at least for God. But since modes are just particular expressions of the essence of God (2?Ip25s), existence and causal power will be identical for them as well.14 So any particular individual's degree of existence just is its degree of causal power.15 To understand Spinoza's conception of degrees of existence, then, we need to make sense of his conception of causal power. I have argued that a complex individual's causal powers, whatever they may be, derive from the pattern of causal relations among its parts.16 Some patterns confer more powers than others, thougha human
J9IM6 ("By reality and perfection I understand the same thing") and the definitions of Joy and Sadness in Elll ("Joy is a human's passage from a lesser to a greater perfection"; "Sadness is a human's passage from a greater to a lesser perfection"). Since Spinoza clearly does think that we can experience joy and sadness to varying degrees, he must also think that our reality or existence itself also admits of degrees. I am glossing over a potential distinction between existence (existentiam) and reality (realitatem) in Spinoza's metaphysics. I think Spinoza implicitly rejects this distinction in a few key passages, such as 2?Vp40, but these passages are admittedly ambiguous. In any case, it would sound just as foreign to the contemporary philosopher to say that things have different degrees of reality as it does to say that things have different degrees of existence, so what I say here to explicate Spinoza's conception of graded existence could just as well be taken as an explication of graded reality. 14Cf. Ip36dem 15I have here attempted to argue that Spinoza is committed to degrees of existence by his views on the relation between causal power and existence. Delia Rocca (2008, 263-270) (cf. Delia Rocca Forthcoming) offers an alternative line of reasoning from his interpretation of Spinoza's PSR. My aim in focusing on causal power, here, is to sidestep any concerns about whether or not Spinoza was in some sense an idealist; I think we can get at the nuance and interest of Spinoza's conception of existence without falling into the debate about idealism at all. 16I regret that I have left the connection between the pattern and the powers that it confers largely mysterious. I have only attempted to show that Spinoza held that there is such a connection
13Consider

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being has greater power of acting than a corpse. Is there some feature of a pattern that explains why it has more (or less) power than another? Spinoza's principle of sufficient reason forces him to say that there must be an explanation for the difference; our problem is to provide that explanation. In so doing, we will have explained why different individuals have different degrees of causal powernamely, because their different patterns confer different degrees of powerand we will thereby also have explained why different individuals have different degrees of existence. In order to draw out Spinoza's views on this topic, I want to return to his discussion of parthood in a famous letter to Oldenburg: On the question of whole and parts, I consider things as parts of a whole to the extent that their natures adapt [accomodat] themselves to one another so that they are in the closest possible agreement. (Ep. 32) This passage is helpful in showing why Spinoza would have accepted COMPOSITION plausibly, what it means to say that the natures of several things "adapt" to one another is just that they stand in a pattern of causal relations, so that the state of one of them is properly explained by appeal to its causal relations to the others. Note that the sense of "agreement" that Spinoza is using in this passage does not mean "similarity". It is true that at some points in the Ethics he seems to rely on the claim that things with similar natures will "agree" with one another (see esp. IVpl8s); however, in this letter he is referring to a kind of causal interdependence:
between patterns and powers. Though I would have liked to say more about the relation by which the instantiation of a pattern of causal relations confers causal powers, I do not know that there is much more to be said about it. It seems to me that this is a hard problem for any metaphysic of powers, like Spinoza's, that denies emergence. One way the story might go is this: a composite whole has its genuine properties in virtue of the pattern of causal relations instantiated by its parts, and its genuine properties confer upon it its characteristic powers. But someone who tells this story is open to the criticism that she has simply pushed the problem back a step by trading (i) the relation between an individual's causal structure and its powers for (ii) the relation between an individual's properties and its powers. This problem of conferral presents an intriguing opening for future research.

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For example, when the motions of particles of lymph, chyle, etc. adapt themselves to one another in accordance with size and shape so as to be fully in agreement with one another and to form all together one single fluid, to that extent only are the chyle, lymph, etc. regarded as parts of the blood. (Ep. 32) The idea is not that "particles of lymph, chyle, etc." are similar, but that they stand in a certain sort of causal relationship. (What causal relationship do they stand in? I've already given my interpretation: they instantiate a pattern of causal relations.) Before going further, I should anticipate an objection to my use of this passage. Throughout the letter, Spinoza continually speaks of the conditions under which someone would regard or have an idea of several things as composing a whole. But this does not really bear on the special composition question, since it introduces an extra epistemic operator: it does not tell us the conditions under which some xs compose an individual, only the conditions under which an observer believes that some xs compose an individual. So (the objection goes) this passage does not bear on Spinoza's metaphysics of composition; it bears on his epistemology of composition. But, as is so often the case with Spinoza, things are somewhat more complicated than this tidy picture makes them appear. Just before the quoted passage, Spinoza describes himself as attempting to provide "the grounds of our belief that each part of Nature accords with the whole and coheres with other parts" (my emphasis). Spinoza's argument then takes the following form: 1. We (properly) regard some bodies as composing an individual just in case (and to the extent that) "their natures adapt themselves to one another..." 2. And we must regard every body as having a nature "adapted" in this way, "for all bodies are surrounded by others and are reciprocally determined to exist and to act in a fixed and determinate way..." (ibid) 3. So we (properly) regard all bodies as composing one individual.

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The point of introducing the epistemic language is not actually to relativize the discussion of composition to an observer; it is rather intended to provide a justification for his claim that all bodies jointly compose one infinite individual. Although the argument does not wear its geometrical structure on its sleeve, it lines up nicely with Spinoza's method in the Ethics: he begins by introducing a definition, then turns to showing how that definition can (or must) be satisfied in ways the reader might not initially have realized. As a result, it is safe to treat Spinoza's discussion of parthood in Ep. 32 as pertaining to his metaphysics of composition. Now I want to suggest that this passage further shows how Spinoza thinks composition is related to causal power. Namely, a pattern of causal relations confers powers to the degree that its parts have natures adapted to one another. I think Spinoza's talk of natures adapting to one another can be understood in a fairly straightforward way in terms of patterns of causal relations. Consider two individuals, one such that its parts, the xs, instantiate a pattern of causal relations, P, primarily in virtue of the work of non-xs; the other such that its parts, the t/s, instantiate P primarily in virtue of their own natures. The first individual is very dependent for its existence upon external things. The second individual is, by contrast, very independent of external things. Although these individuals have the same nature (P), they will differ in power to the extent that their parts differ in acting to promote the instantiation of that nature.17 In general, I say Spinoza is committed to: INDEPENDENCE: If some xs compose y, then y1s degree of causal power is correlated with the degree to which the xs by their very natures instantiate y's pattern.
am considering two individuals of the same nature to isolate what I take to be the more problematic connection between composition and causal power, namely how composites of the same nature may differ in degree of power. The other questionhow composites with different patterns may differ in powerseems to me more straightforward, and a question for science rather than metaphysics. (For instance, we would need to consider, not mereology, but chemistry.)
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The picture I have in mind is something like this. A complex whole is like a team of chariot horses, or sled dogs. The best possible situation for such a team is when each member is working with the rest of the team entirely of his own accordwhen they all act as one, as it were. Worse is when some members refuse to work with the rest of the team of their own accord, and must somehow be forced to cooperate. There is still a team to speak of, but the members of the team to some extent fail to act as one. Worst of all is when the members cannot be coerced into cooperating at all; then there just is no team to speak of. These cases suggest a continuum of different ways in which parts could compose an individual: wholly of their own accord ("by their very natures"), partly of their own accord, or, at the limit, not at all. This picture is closer to the situation Spinoza describes in Ep. 32 than it might at first seem. One might worry, for instance, that in speaking of horses and dogs "acting of their own accord," I have introduced free will into the picturebut Spinoza does not believe in free will, and even if he did, he would not want to appeal to it to explain degrees of composition. Yet, strangely enough, I think this is mistaken. Spinoza does have a relevant conception of freedom, and it is closely connected to acting from one's nature: "That thing is called free which...is determined to act by itself alone" (,EId7). Although on Spinoza's picture only God is entirely free, he also makes use of a graded conception of freedom on which, to the extent that an action follows from an individual's nature, that action (and that individual) is free.18 For Spinoza, to the extent that the parts of a house by their very natures compose the housethat is, to the extent that the essences of the parts of the house alone suffice to explain the house's existenceit is technically correct to say that the parts compose the
ETV Preface and IVp66s. Cf. Marshall (Forthcoming, Ch. 5, Sec. 2): "[For Spinoza,] one has human freedom just when one acts on one's rational desires." I think Marshall is correct here, and the reading supports my claim insofar as actions pursuant to one's "rational desires" are actions that arise from one's nature.
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house freely. My contention so fax is that, on Spinoza's account, the degree to which some things compose an individual is the degree to which they freely compose that individual, and this degree correlates with that individual's degree of causal power. To justify this reading, let me close by providing some passages from the Ethics that support it. Daniel Garber has proposed that in Spinoza's definition of composite individuals, he (implicitly) makes room for the parts of a body to depend upon external forces to a greater or lesser degree:
When a number of bodies...are [1] so constrained by other bodies that they lie upon one another, or [2] if they so move...that they communicate their motions to one another in a certain particular pattern...they all together compose one body or individual... (?IIpl3s Definition)

Garber takes the first clause to suggest the possibility of composite bodies that are bound up in a particular pattern of causal relations due primarily to external influence. The wine in a bottle might be an example of just such a composite body, for it is "only because of the causal influence of the bottle that it retains its unity" (Garber, 1994, 56). The second clause is supposed to open up space for composites unified primarily in virtue of the natures of their parts. A planet might be an example of a composite body of this sort, since it is primarily the natures of its parts that result in its having a certain shape, atmosphere, and so on. The human body is an interesting intermediate case: it is at once like the wine in a bottlesince the body is greatly reliant on atmospheric pressure for its continued functionbut its parts are more intimately bound up than those of the wine in acting to preserve the whole. Nor is this an alien way of thinking about composition. Especially when dealing with material objects, it is easy to work up the intuition that several things are very strongly composed if they retain their pattern in many and varied contexts, or very weakly composed if they lose their pattern easily. Even when dealing with ideas,

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we can make some sense of the claim. Suppose several ideas stand in a pattern of association and inference; it is easy to imagine these associations and inferences having different degrees of clarity or vivacity. We have all likely had the experience of trying to work through a complex line of thought and losing track of the component ideas because they are not easily associated or inferred. It is no stretch to call such a line of thought weakly composed, or alternatively to call a very tight chain of reasoning strongly composed. Other passages make it clear that Spinoza endorses something like the distinction Garber draws between bodies dependent primarily upon "internal" forces and those dependent primarily upon "external" forces. The passage with which Spinoza introduces the Physical Digression of 2IIpl3s includes this interesting claim:
...in proportion as a body is more capable than others of doing many things at once, or being acted on in many ways at once, so its mind is more capable than others of perceiving many things at once. And in proportion as the actions of

a body depend more on itself alone, and as other bodies concur with it less in acting, so its mind is more capable of understanding distinctly. And from these
things we can know the excellence of one mind over the others... (2?IIpl3s, emph. added).

There is some debate about this passage, regarding just how Spinoza thinks consciousness and the body are related. Garrett (2008) has it that for Spinoza, consciousness is a mind's power, and hence is properly a function of the body's power of acting. Nadler (2008) argues (against Garrett) that for Spinoza, consciousness is a mind's complexity, and hence is properly a function of the body's complexity. But this is all to one side of the present discussion: either way you slice it, Spinoza clearly accepts that some composite individuals are more causally independent or self-sufficient than others, and greater degrees of independence correspond to greater degrees of "excellence." Whence this correspondence between independence and excellence? A composite individual that depends less upon outside forces to maintain its pattern of causal

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relations is more excellent because it is more like a substance. Substance is causa sui (f?Idl), and it "does not require the concept of another thing, from which it must be formed" (Md3). A composite individual whose pattern does not depend very much upon external forces approximates the total self-sufficiency of substance itself.19 INDEPENDENCE, then, gives us the connection between composition and causal power we were looking for. Say that an individual x's degree of composition is the degree to which it is compositionally independent in the sense just discussedthat is, the degree to which the natures of re's parts alone suffice to explain the instantiation of x's pattern of causal relations. With this conception of degrees of composition, we can account for the differences in causal power among different complex individuals. An individual's pattern confers causal power to the extent that its parts act in ways that promote its composition; its pattern confers less causal power to the extent that its parts act in ways that obstruct its composition. And, crucially, these variations in degrees of causal power in turn reflect variations in degrees of existence. A composite individual with parts that consistently and independently act to promote its composition exists to a greater degree than an individual with parts that only promote its composition under the influence of many external forces.

Conclusion I have argued that Spinoza is able to resist the argument from vagueness by appealing to principled sharp cutoffs between cases of composition and non-composition. I have also argued that Spinoza's account of composition does not on its lonesome
"substantiality" at issue here is distinct from that discussed by Garrett (2002, 127-158), though I think Garrett's point dovetails nicely with what I say here. The idea, speaking generally, is that finite modes bear certain substance-like features, and these substance-like features are (like substance itself) inherently connected with causal power. (Cf. Garrett (2003, 213-214) for a further way in which modes may be "quasi-substantial", albeit one that I am not certain correlates straightforwardly with causal power.)
19The

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entail that existence admits of degrees, and so it should be acceptable even to those philosophers who find untenable graded conceptions of existence. However, I acknowledged that Spinoza himself does seem to accept that existence admits of degrees; I then showed how the account of composition I have attributed to him helps make sense of his conception of graded existencenamely, a composite individual exists to the degree that its parts act, by their very natures, to promote its composition. This completes my interpretation of Spinoza's account of composition, situating it within his larger project of giving an account of existence itself. I have throughout attempted to render Spinoza's account not only coherent, but persuasive. I recognize that, any attempt on this front can attain only marginal success at best. Nonetheless, I have argued that Spinoza's account has a number of advantages that were not obvious at the outset of this work. It is internally coherent. It is in many ways superior to contemporary alternatives. And it can resist the argument from vagueness, the strongest principled argument against it.

Conclusion
My focus in this dissertation has been to show how Spinoza accounts for composition in terms of causation, and to defend his account. By appealing to causation in this way, Spinoza can explain the unity of a composite individual without recourse to the traditional Scholastic account of composition, on which individuals (substances) are hylomorphic unities of form and matter. By contrast, Spinoza locates the unity of an individual as immanent to the efficient causal interaction of its parts. In discussing the passages that led me to my central interpretive conclusions, I have (for purposes of brevity) passed over some philosophical difficulties that my interpretation faces in handling Spinoza's doctrine of the eternity of the mind. Although Spinoza's claims about the eternity of the mind might seem largely irrelevant to his account of composition, Spinoza sometimes speaks of that which survives our death as the "eternal part of the mind" (as I shall discuss shortly). Yet parthood and composition are, on the face of it, interdefinable termse.g., let x is part of y there are some zs such that x and the zs compose y. This suggests that my interpretation ought to be able to account for this eternal part of the mind in the same way I have accounted for Spinoza's talk of finite bodies and ideas. A number of problems crop up as soon as COMPOSITION and PATTERN are conjoined with the notion of an "eternal part". In this conclusion, I want to lay out the problems that Spinoza's account of composition presents when considered in tandem with his doctrine of the eternity of the mind. As I see it, there are two interpretive options available for making sense of an "eternal part" of a finite mind without taking Spinoza to be equivocating on the term 'part'. The first option is to read Spinoza as countenancing parts that do not

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stand in any efficient causal relations; the second option is to read Spinoza as using an atemporal sense of efficient causation. I am sympathetic to neither option. After presenting and criticizing the two options, I will close with some directions for future research suggested by these difficulties. In the latter half of Ethics V, Spinoza frequently speaks of "the eternal part of the mind" (Vp39 & 40c).20 The eternal part of the mind, Spinoza tells us, is the idea of the essence of the human body (Vp23dem), which is the intellect (Vp40c). Our aim in this life, according to Spinoza, is to strive to make the eternal part of our mind "greatest" [maximam] (Vp20s) and to bring it about that the part of our mind "related with memory and imagination is of hardly any moment" in comparison to the eternal part (Vp39s). Commentators have observed a number of problems with Spinoza's claims in this part of the Ethics; so many, in fact, that I will not attempt to mention them all here. But there is one central puzzle about this "eternal part of the mind" that bears specifically on Spinoza's account of composition. The puzzle is to explain how the idea of the essence of the human body could justifiably be said to be part of the human mind. Based on Spinoza's account of the composition of ideas, for that idea to be a part of the human mind would mean that it must stand in a pattern of causal relations with the other ideas that compose the human mind. But the idea of the essence of the human body is supposed to be eternal, so it is not clear how it could give rise to, or be given rise to by, other (non-eternal) ideas in the human mind. This puzzle is often ignored by commentators in favor of the higher mysteries of Spinoza's justification for his claim that the mind survives death. Yet without a satisfactory explanation of how the idea of the essence of the
29 and several other passages in Ethics V also concern this "part" of the mind, as is made clear by Spinoza's reference to those propositions in Vp40c.
20Vp23,

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human body could be a genuine paxt of the human mind, we haven't even settled what Spinoza's claim means.21 The essence of the human body at issue in Vp23dem is what Spinoza elsewhere calls its "formal essence" (IIp8), which he never defines, but treats as something eternal (Vp22).22 Spinoza also explicitly treats the idea of this essence as eternal (Vp23s). To say that the idea of this formal essence is a part of the mind thus entails that there is a part of the mind that is eternal. Given the account of composition I have attributed to Spinoza, this means that there is an eternal idea that is bound up in a pattern of causal relations with various non-eternal, finite, inadequate ideas. How can this be? The problem here is not that a whole is supposed to contain a part that exists even when the whole does not. That happens frequently, on Spinoza's account of composition, and it presents no intuitive difficulty. The problem is rather to explain how something that is eternal in Spinoza's sensepossessed of an existence that "cannot be defined by time, or explained through duration" (Vp23s)could be part of something existing in time. Spinoza has accounted for composition in terms of efficient carnal relations among an individual's parts. As a result, the account seems
second puzzle is subsidiary to this one: supposing that the idea of the essence of the human body is in fact part of the human mind, under what conditions is it the "greatest" part? Some commentators have, I think rightly, suggested that "greatest" has a comparative sense here, so that ideas are greatest in the mind that have the most influence on the actions of that mind. LebufFe (2010, 371-375) lays out a nice case for taking roughly this view. I also agree with these commentators that, on Spinoza's view, we somehow increase the relative influence of the eternal part of the mind by turning our inadequate ideas into adequate ones. (Cf. Delia Rocca (2008, 270): On Spinoza's view, "we should acquire a greater number of adequate ideas because then we will, literally, more fully exist and be more fully eternal." If the "greater number of adequate ideas" is understood loosely in terms of the comparative influence those ideas have upon the whole mindas I think Delia Rocca ought to intend, given that Spinoza explicitly says that a mind's adequate ideas may be its "greatest part" even if the mind contains equally many inadequate ideas (Vp20s)then I agree with this reading.) 22This fact makes formal essences different than actual essences, since (as I argued at length in Chapter 3) an individual's actual essence is its existence (IIIp7dem). Cf. Garrett (2009, 285-286), who more cautiously claims that "the actual essence of a thing...is not properly contrasted with the thing's existence."
21A

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to demand of us that we think of parts and wholes as "defined in time". Yet that conception of parthood seems to be ruled out in the case of eternal parts. I can think of two ways to read Spinoza charitably on this point. The first way is suggested (but not spelled out) in Don Garrett's proposal that "...if the parts of a body need not be limited to spatially discrete paxts, then Spinoza is free to construe the formal essence of the human body as itself a part of the human body", and so the idea of that essence would be part of the mind (Garrett, 2009, 294). Garrett's proposal, taken at face value, does not really resolve the problem as I have outlined it, though. True, Spinoza's account of composition does seem to allow for parts that are not "spatially discrete". However, according to COMPOSITION and PATTERN, those parts must nevertheless bear at least some efficient causal relations to one another. But this is ruled out by the fact that something that is eternal cannot "have any relation to time" (Vp23s), on the assumption that efficient causal relations must involve temporalityif nothing else, efficient causes must come before their effects. We might flesh out Garrett's proposal, then, by denying that each part of a thing must stand in at least some efficient causal relations to at least some of its other parts. This way, we preserve the claim that the essence of the body is genuinely a part of the body (and the idea of that essence genuinely part of the mind), and we also preserve the restriction that an eternal thing may bear no relation to time or temporal order. The price we pay for ameliorating the puzzle about eternal parts, on this reading, is that we must give up the account of composition developed in the foregoing chapters. I have difficulty talcing this to be a serious challenge to my interpretation, however. Aside from the fact that it seems to be an ad hoc response to a doctrine that many commentators have found incomprehensible in the first place, it simply replaces a puzzle with a problem. On this proposal, we must jettison COMPOSITION (at least).

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But if COMPOSITION does not provide us with Spinoza's account of composition, what does? In the absence of any further explanation of what makes these eternal parts parte, this proposal leaves us at back at square one with respect to understanding Spinoza's metaphysics of composition. The second way in which we could read Spinoza's talk of eternal parts charitably is to reject the assumption (implicit in my discussion of Garrett's proposal) that efficient causation must involve temporality. If we reject this assumption, then we make room for an eternal thing to bear efficient causal relations to non-eternal thingsnormal, everyday sorts of things, things Spinoza sometimes says are "explained by duration" (Vp23s) or "considered in relation to a certain time and place" (Vp37s). That's not to say that there would be no constraints upon the ideas the eternal part of one's mind could give rise to. For instance, something's being eternal ("not explained by duration") might imply that it is also sempiternal (presently existing at all times). If this were so, it is hard to see how the eternal part of the mind could efficiently cause the idea of one's birthday, say, unless that idea were constantly present in one's mind. So the eternal parts of a finite individual might only be causally connected to certain other parts, and only in certain very limited ways. Still, this would resolve the puzzle about eternal parts, for it would allow us simply to apply COMPOSITION and PATTERN as usual. The price we pay for preserving the account, however, is building an extra layer of complexity into Spinoza's conception of efficient causation. There are even several passages early in Ethics I that show that Spinoza was open to this ambiguous conception of efficient causation. The first passage in its favor is Ipl6cl: "Prom [the fact that infinitely many things in infinitely many modes can be deduced from God's nature] it follows that God is the efficient cause of all things..." I appealed to this passage in Chapter 3 to argue that Spinoza sees an analogy between the way in which a geometrical figure's properties follow from its nature and the

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way in which a complex individual's causal powers follow from its nature. However, the passage could be read as supporting the stronger thesis that efficient causation is literally some sort of logical deduction. Since logical deductions are atemporal, then, this would provide one possible sense for our proposed atemporal conception of efficient causation. Further evidence for this view shows up in Z?Ip25: "God is the efficient cause, not only of the existence of things, but also of their essence." Since formal essences are eternal, this is a case in which we one eternal thing (God) standing in an efficient causal relation to another eternal thing (essences). So the efficient causal relation in question cannot be temporalit would be impossible for the cause to come before the effect. As if this were not clear enough, Spinoza adds in a scholium: "...in a word, God must be called the cause of all things in the same sense in which he is called the cause of himself." Yet, as we know from Ip7 and Ipll, God is self-caused. So the scholium to Ip25 is implicitly committing Spinoza to the claim that this relation of self-causation is an efficient causal relation. Clearly, though, it cannot be a relation that involves a temporal ordering. Although I should be eager to embrace this approach, since it saves my proposed interpretation, I am not sympathetic to the introduction of an atemporal sense of efficient causation. It would seem to me efficient causation in name only. Really, we would be speaking of two different sorts of causal relation. One of these relations efficient causationis such that the cause is always prior in time to its effect. The other does not have this feature. Taking this approach thus presents us with a number of serious and thoroughgoing problems about Spinoza's metaphysics of causation: what makes both of these relations causal? (What makes them both efficient!) Is there a difference between a causal relation and the more general metaphysical priority relation? Does one of these relations entail the other? At a glance, the text wildly

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underdetermines the answers to these questions. The puzzle remains unsolved, then. That is not to say it is unsolvable. At the risk of oversimplifying, what remains to be done is to lay out Spinoza's account of causation. While this is clearly a project that cannot be undertaken in this dissertation, it is also a project that benefits from the work of this dissertation. Having shown how Spinoza accounts for composition in terms of causation will provide some constructive boundaries on the interpretation of his metaphysics of causation. Put simply, the interpretation must be consistent with COMPOSITION and PATTERN. Presumably, though, laying out Spinoza's account of causation would also give us further insight into Spinoza's reasons for holding COMPOSITION and PATTERN. Spinoza's account of causation also bears an important but murky connection to his conception of existence. I have leaned upon what I take to be the clearer aspects of this connection in vaxious arguments herefor example, the material equivalence between existence and the possession of causal power. But a full account of Spinoza's view would also explain why this material equivalence holds. My suspicion is that Spinoza takes the concepts of existence and causal power to be not merely coextensive, but identical. However, if this suspicion is correct, it raises a variety of questions. Are there different kinds of existence just as there are different kinds of causal power? (Are there different kinds of causal power?) Some causal powers seem to be relative, like the power (conferred by the property of being axe-shaped) of being able to cut wood if made of steel. Does this mean existence is relative as well? Or are we instead to reject the notion of relative causal powers? A full account of Spinoza's view will not only provide answers to these questions, but give us the principles lying behind those answers. Let me conclude, then, by proposing this projectthe interpretation of Spinoza's account of causationas a direction for future research. Much has been written

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about bits and pieces of Spinoza's account of causation, such as his views about the connection between causal and conceptual relations.23 What is needed, by contrast, is a much broader and more thoroughgoing investigation into Spinoza's metaphysics of causation and its connections (both overt as well as subterranean) to other aspects of his thought. I have attempted to shed some light on Spinoza's metaphysics of composition. Much more remains to be done.

23See

Chapter 4.1, "Spinoza's PSR and Arbitrary Existence," for some discussion of this point.

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Curriculum Vitae JOHN GREY

Philosophy Department Boston University 745 Commonwealth Avenue Boston, MA 02215 PHONE: (617) 697-2662 EMAIL: tietze@bu.edu URL: https://sites.google.com/site/jrtgrey/ AREAS OF RESEARCH AOS: Modern Philosophy, Metaphysics AOC: Logic, History of Philosophy, Philosophy of Science EDUCATION 2006-2012 PhD Philosophy, Boston University Dissertation Title: Spinoza's Account of Composition Defense Date: February 13, 2012 Committee: Aaron Garrett, Dave Liebesman, Michael Delia Rocca, Amelie Rorty 2002-2006 BA Philosophy and Computer Science, University of Minnesota ACADEMIC PRESENTATIONS
2012

"Reconsidering Spinoza on the Lower Animals" Biennial Margaret Wilson Conference Dartmouth College "Spinoza's Analogy of Parthood in Ethics V" British Society for the History of Philosophy Conference Ghent University
2011

"Representation and Intentionality in Berkeley's Master Argument" Workshop on Early Modern Philosophy

Boston University "Reconsidering Spinoza on the Lower Animals" Princeton-Penn-Columbia Graduate Conference in History of Philosophy Princeton University
2010

"A Contradiction in Spinoza's Ethics" New England Colloquium on Early Modern Philosophy Yale University
2008

"Two Approaches to the Principle of Sufficient Reason" Graduate Presentation Series Boston University 2005 "Proofs and Explanations: Wittgenstein's Influence on Kuhn's Philosophy of Science" Undergraduate Philosophy Conference Macalaster College TEACHING As Instructor Introduction to Philosophy, Boston University, 2012 Introduction to Logic, Boston University, 2011 Introduction to Philosophy, Northeastern University Global Pathways, 2011-12 As Teaching Fellow Identities of Persons, with Amelie Rorty, 2009 Introduction to Ethics, with Dan Star, 2009 Introduction to Logic, with Judson Webb, 2008 Introduction to Political Philosophy, with Aaron Garrett, 2008 Introduction to Logic, with Juliet Floyd, 2007