Baruch Spinoza's Solution to the Inside Outside Problem - Essay Example

During the said Modern period, there were several prominent philosophers. There were the rationalists, on one hand, led by Descartes, Leibnitz, and Spinoza himself. On the other hand, there were the Liberalists like Hobbes, John Locke, and Berkeley. Rationalists took mathematics as their model for knowledge, and empiricists took the physical sciences. Thus the Ethics is written in a Euclidian manner, based on propositions, axioms, and proofs.

Ethics Demonstrated in a Geometrical Manner – The Book
Spinoza’s most famous book and the subject of this study, ‘Ethics Demonstrated in a Geometrical Manner’ appeared in print after his death in 1677. Spinoza uses a geometrical method earlier employed by Euclid in his Elements. Spinoza argues that there is no transcendental God and that the universe exists without any ultimate purpose or goal. The book is exceedingly difficult to understand as it is written in Latin. Because of this, Spinoza “was compelled to express his essentially modern thoughts in medieval and scholastic terms”.

The ethics comprise of five parts or chapters. Part I describes in detail the metaphysics of Spinoza, Part II relates to (a) the nature of mind and how it relates to the body, and (b) a general theory of knowledge. Part III Spinoza deals with ‘effects’, his name for the theory of emotions, and also with human psychology. Parts IV and V explain his ethical theories.
Each part of the Ethics is divided into definitions of key terms, axioms, demonstrations, corollary, and Scholia. Of all these parts, Spinoza chooses Scholia to argue, defend or demonstrate his material in a way which a lesser trained mind can understand. Spinoza adds appendices in Parts I and IV. In Part II, after proposition 13, Spinoza inserts a digression on physics and laws of motion. At the end of Part III, he adds a list of definitions of the effects, as argued therein. Ethics is divided into Part (I to V), proposition (p), definition (d), scholium (s), and corollary (c). The referencing style used in this essay is the referencing style used in the Everyman Library text. All direct quotations by Spinoza are underlined for easy reference