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J., " I do wonder whether your attempt to reclaim a Plotinian/Scholastic heritage for Spinoza is as much to do with your own project" Oh, very much so. Only by putting several projects side by side do we get a better understanding of what the thinker believed and also achieved (and yes they...

J, I hope this makes some sort of sense, I hadn’t really finished it when your reply to Mark made me strip various bits out and add others. I have a feeling that the problem I am having with this is summed up by this quote Quote: From the point of view of God, that is under the form of...

K-punk, I simply have no idea where you are getting this notion of redemtion from in Spinoza. Yes, a movement towards freedom is possible for certain bodies, but it does not happen punctually at the 'end of time' To me the end-of-time is posited by an inferred position outside-of-time. If...

J., There's not much point me giving a knee-jerk reaction to your last post as I need to think about what you're saying. It would be helpful if you could clarify what you mean by diachrony, as I still do not understand how this applies to Spinoza's ontology. I take diachrony to be change over...

J., “Spinoza is not an empiricist and knowledge of the second kind is not empirical knowledge. An adequate idea is the same whether it is grasped via reason or intuition. Reason can and does yield knowledge in its complete form.” I did not mean to imply that empirical knowledge is of the 2nd...

K-punk, Yes, Augustine tooks about the Greater and the Lesser Good --- his problem is to see off the Manicheans, who maintained that good and evil were equal and opposite. In THAT respect, Augustine is not a dualist; but, unlike Spinoza, he remains a SUBSTANCE dualist in that he thinks that...

K-punk, Yes, I can only reinforce what John says. It's important not to collapse Spinoza into a familiar dualism ---- Augustine thinks that the escape is from matter into spirit... Actually in following Plotinus, it is not a strict dualism, but rather a gradation of Being. Like Spinoza...

J., “I'm not at all sure why you would want to say this of Spinoza. Given the immanence of Substance and the parallelism of the attributes, there is no 'spiritual' as such.” I agree, Spinoza has a tremendous reputation for a non-transcendent approach, but what I suggest is simply that he is...

K-punk, " you only need intellectual understanding of the principles by which nature operates...." But what is germane is that one is to follow that understanding "against the claims of our own advantage" in order for our better half to persist in existing. This is not throwing oneself in...

K-punk, I mean transcendental in the Plotinus sense. I agree that there is no end-of-time judgment of god, but there does seem to be the sense of an end-of-time synchronism, for instance in his use of intuition to know "under the form of eternity". It is as if the fragmented diachrony that...

K-punk and all. I've been wrestling with Spinoza as of late and cannot escape the sense that there are strong Transcendentalist (really Plotinus-like) tendencies within him. If I could put it in short, his Natura naturans "naturing Nature" is a synchrony and his Natura naturata appears a...