精东传媒

Abstract: In the definition of God in the first part of the聽Ethics, Spinoza introduces his (seemingly) unique and idiosyncratic concept of expression. For Spinoza, God has an infinity of attributes and each one is said to express God’s infinite and eternal essence.聽 With the exception of a few, this term remains a desiderata in the scholarship on Spinoza’s attribute theory and broader metaphysics. My talk focuses on the role of expression in Spinoza’s theory of attributes. The first part of my talk argues that the concept of expression is indeed a notion working in his metaphysics of the attributes. The second part of my talk (very much a WIP) aims to offer an account of the metaphysics of the concept of expression by reimagining his attribute theory in a way that is inclusive of the concept of expression.