How Ethics drew on Meditations on First Philosophy
A documented line of influence: Baruch Spinoza demonstrably engaged René Descartes’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Meditations on First Philosophy
René Descartes · 1641
EnlightenmentThe influenced
Ethics
Baruch Spinoza · 1677
EnlightenmentRelevance
9/10
On Ethics’s page
- Spinoza learned the method here and then weaponized it — the Ethics proves its propositions geometrically, exactly as a reworking of Descartes' system
- Descartes' world has two substances, thinking mind and extended matter; Spinoza answers with one, and the Ethics is the systematic refutation of that dualism
- Read the Meditations first to see what Spinoza is overturning — the certainty of a separate, immaterial self is precisely what he refuses to grant
On Meditations on First Philosophy’s page
- Spinoza cut his teeth on Descartes — his first published book laid out Principles of Cartesian Philosophy in geometric form
- He kept Descartes' machinery, the more-geometrico method of definitions, axioms, and proofs, and turned it on Descartes himself
- The Ethics is built to demolish the one thing Descartes was surest of: the split between mind and body, two substances where Spinoza will allow only one