The will is the key component of Duns Scotus’s moral theory, both because Duns Scotus held (quite uncontroversially) that we are morally responsible only for our free choices and their outcomes and because (more controversially) he thought that most principles detailing what is morally good and what is morally bad depends on God’s free decisions. The key, then, question is how we know contingent practical principles. This essay offers an account of our knowledge of such principles that is (a) consistent with what Duns Scotus says about the relationship of the moral law to the divine will and to human nature, (b) consistent with what he says more generally about our knowledge of contingent truths, and (c) consistent with his actual argumentative practice in dealing with contingent practical principles. The examination of Duns Scotus’s argumentative practice uncovers a third, hitherto unnoticed, sense of ‘natural law’. This essay suggests that the core unifying sense of ‘natural law’ for Duns Scotus is precisely the epistemic status of the precepts of natural law as non-inferentially evident.

This essay focuses on the way the first cause’s action relates to the action of created causes, with a particular focus on the action of created wills. Since medieval thinkers considered God an active causal source of all existents, they believed that God must in some way actively cause the actions of created causes, including the acts of the will. Duns Scotus’s thought on this matter is particularly interesting because, as is widely recognized, he was committed to a robust understanding of the created will’s freedom. This essay argues that Duns Scotus struggled to figure out how God could be involved in causing the operation of such a spontaneously and autonomously operating cause. He wrestled with two different theories, and ultimately could not make up his mind. This essay reconstructs Duns Scotus’s analysis of competing positions while tracking the developments in his thought.

Substance (substantia, zelfstandigheid)’ is a key term of Spinoza’s philosophy. Like almost all of Spinoza’s philosophical vocabulary, Spinoza did not invent this term, which has a long history that can be traced back at least to Aristotle. Yet, Spinoza radicalized the traditional notion of substance and made a very powerful use of it by demonstrating – or at least attempting to demonstrate – that there is only one, unique substance – God (or Nature) – and that all other things are merely modes or states of God. In the first section, I examine Spinoza’s definitions of "substance" and "God" at the opening of the Ethics. In the second section, I study the properties of the fundamental binary relations pertaining to Spinoza’s substance: inherence, conception, and causation. The third section is dedicated to a clarification of Spinoza’s claim that God, the unique substance, is absolutely infinite. The fourth section studies the nature of Spinoza’s monism. It will discuss and criticize the interesting yet controversial views of Martial Gueroult, about the plurality of substances in the beginning of the Ethics and evaluate Spinoza’s kind of ontological monism. The fifth and final section explains the nature, reality, and manner of existence of modes.

Introduction to the second edition of The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza

Over his career, Kant engages in a long attempt – which reaches a high point in the Prolegomena – to forge what in the Physical Monadology he calls a ‘marriage’ of metaphysics and geometry. The chapter traces the development of Kant’s thought on this union from its pre-critical roots to its flowering in the Prolegomena, and focuses on the role that geometric construction in natural science plays in connecting the two disciplines. This has implications both for how we should understand Kant’s desire to discover the ‘common origin’ of mathematics and natural science that is spelled out in the Prolegomena, as well as how this bears on Kant’s broader views about the status of natural science and laws.

The chapter explores the ways in which Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion influenced Kant. Both Hume and Kant have deep reservations about traditional theistic arguments about God, but each declines to reject them entirely, choosing instead to allow that there is some legitimacy in thinking of the world ‘as if’ it were created by God. The essay argues that Kant’s and Hume’s positions are – at least on this issue – much closer than might be expected, particularly in light of Kant’s attempt in the Prolegomena to distance himself from Hume’s attacks on deism.

The chapter focuses on Kant’s rather surprising claim that although we cannot have any direct cognition in metaphysics, we can nonetheless have “cognition by analogy” of things such as God and the world-whole. While Kant says relatively little about what this involves, the essay makes the case that cognition by analogy, and in particular the symbolic cognition of God, shows that Kant’s account of how we meet the criteria for cognition is far more flexible than is typically recognized. The analysis of Kant’s use of analogy more generally widens the scope of how we as humans, who are at once sensible and intelligible, stand in relation to the world of experience.

The teaching of creation has been much misunderstood and under-developed because it has been taken to be primarily about how the world began a long, long time ago. Religious naturalists have often abandoned this teaching so as to give a more scientifically informed characterization of our cosmos and humanity’s place within it. Wirzba argues that this is a big mistake because the rejection of the idea that our world is a divinely created world makes it impossible to speak of life as a gift. This chapter develops what it means to say that each creature is gift cherished and sustained in its being by God. As such, it opens the idea of creation to encompass life’s meaning and purpose, and it creates a way for people to become involved in the nurture and healing of our world and our shared life. The logic of creation, upon further examination, is not about God’s power “over” the world but about God’s presence to the world in the forms of love that invite human participation in it.

Also Schelling – by 1802 a declared Spinozist – altered his methodology, adding to it a phenomenological dimension. In 1807 he portrayed the philosopher as an artist singularly gifted with an intuitive sense for nature as issuing from the Oneness of the Absolute, equally substance and subject. Jacobi attacked him for this. Chapter 4 details Schelling’s ensuing controversy with him but is otherwise dedicated to Schelling’s seminal Freedom Essay (1809). In the essay Schelling again portrayed the philosopher as a divinely inspired artist. He now conceived his work, however, as one of remembering the event at which God manifests himself in the form of a world that reflects in its manifold the internal economy of the divine being. This event is shrouded in the human unconscious but can be brought to light through the philosopher’s imaginative representations. The warrant for these is that they resonate with humankind’s belief, embodied in mythology, that its history is also the history of God’s realization in space/time. Schelling was thus adopting a rich metaphysical position, the direct contrary of Fichte’s ontological quietism, which the monism the two shared nonetheless also made possible. Evil comes up as an important issue for Schelling