Document Type : Research Paper
Authors
Philosophy Department, Faculty of Humanities and Literature, University of Tehran
Abstract
One of the challenges faced by Spinoza's commentators is the problem of the nature of attributes; That is, the answer to the question of whether attributes are distinct from the substance (objective interpretation) or not (subjective interpretation). The main difficulty concerning the above-mentioned problem is that any answer to it, leads to another problem, that is, the relation of attributes to each other, and any answer to this later problem also implies an inconsistency; for while claiming for a real distinction between attributes in Ethics, Spinoza believes in the unification of modes arising from various attributes. This issue leads to the following interpretive challenge: if the distinction between substance and attributes is conceptual, the real distinction of attributes remains unjustified and if the real distinction between attributes is to be acknowledged, other difficulties will arise, concerning how to justify the unification of modes. On the other hand, if the ontological implications of the real distinction are to be ignored, the ideas- things parallelism will be lost. In this article, it will be argued that solving the problem of the nature of attributes according to Spinoza depends on the justification of the relationship of attributes with each other, and since the answer to the latter problem is faced by the aforementioned inconsistency, the former problem also will not find a consistent answer in Spinoza’s Philosophy.
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