PHILOS 25B Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Necessitarianism, Baruch Spinoza
Document Summary
Consequences of spinoza"s views: everything that happens happens necessarily i. e. nothing is contingent. We tend to think that things that happen in the physical world didn"t have to happen the way they did: philosophers recognize different kinds of necessity . A ball dropped must necessarily fall to the ground. But this is only necessary given the laws of physics. So, this is not absolutely necessary in the same way that something like 2 + 2 = 4 is absolutely necessary. Necessitarianism: spinoza rejects the different levels of necessity; for him, everything is absolutely necessary just like 2 + 2 = 4 is necessary. We see this in prop 16 and 29: prop 16 everything follows from the necessity of the divine nature, prop 29 nothing in nature is contingent. God"s nature is included in: this view is called necessitarianism. We imagine there to be other scenarios which, for all we know, could have happened, but this is an illusion.
