Physics and Ontology in Spinoza: The Enigmatic Response to Tschirnhaus

What is Spinoza’s relationship to the mathematical physics that followed from the Galilean revolution? In this essay, Matheron reconstructs Spinoza’s response to his interlocutor, Tschirnhaus, regarding the status of the concept of extension in Spinoza’s philosophy and, in particular, its difference from Descartes’s concept of extension. But, as Maheron notes, Spinoza nonetheless encountered difficulties in his response to Tschirnhaus, namely, his need to reformulate his ontology of power by once again rewriting the opening of the Ethics as well as redefine the status of physics. The successive drafts of the Ethics show Spinoza working towards a clearer and more concise account of his ontology of power, which holds that God as absolutely infinite causal substance has the power to produce anything and everything that is conceivable without contradiction. But does it then follow that the laws of the physical universe are deducible a priori? Matheron investigates Spinoza’s attempts to address this question and concludes with a discussion of Spinoza’s relevance for more contemporary developments in science.