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98. - Infinite Modes

from I

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 January 2025

By
Kristin Primus
Edited by
Karolina Hübner  and
Justin Steinberg
Karolina Hübner
Affiliation:
Cornell University, New York
Justin Steinberg
Affiliation:
Cornell University, New York
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Summary

For most philosophers working in seventeenth-century Europe, modes are impermanent and changeable qualities or features; this is why Descartes for example insists that God has no modes (Comments on a Certain Broadsheet, AT 8B.348; cf. Principles i.56, AT 8A.26). Spinoza, however, departs from this consensus view of modes, introducing into his system modes that are infinite, eternal, and immutable: the so-called “infinite modes.”

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Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Spinoza Lexicon , pp. 269 - 272
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Recommended Reading

Curley, E. (1988). Behind the Geometrical Method. Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garrett, D. (1991). Spinoza’s necessitarianism. In Yovel, Y. (ed.), God and Nature: Spinoza’s Metaphysics (pp. 191–218). Brill.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garrett, D. (2009). The essence of the body and the part of the mind that is eternal. In Koistinen, O. (ed.), A Companion to Spinoza’s Ethics (pp. 284–302). Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marshall, G. E. (2008). Adequacy and innateness in Spinoza. Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy, 4, 51–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Melamed, Y. (2013). Spinoza’s Metaphysics: Substance and Thought. Oxford University Press, 113–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Primus, K. (2019). Spinoza’s ‘infinite modes’ reconsidered. Journal of Modern Philosophy, 1(1), 1–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schmaltz, T. (1997). Spinoza’s mediate infinite mode. Journal of the History of Philosophy, 35(2), 199–235.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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