Spinoza on the Essences of Modes

This paper examines some aspects of Spinoza's metaphysics of the essences of modes.2 ²I would like to thank John Carriero, Calvin Normore, Eliot Michaelson, Eileen Nutting, Paul Nichols, Alexi Patsaouras, Rachel Johnson and Sarah Jansen for reading and commenting on earlier versions of this paper. I situate Spinoza's use of the notion of essence as a response to traditional, Aristotelian, ways of thinking about essence. I argue that, although Spinoza rejects part of the Aristotelian conception of essence, according to which it is in virtue of its essence that a thing is a member of a kind, he nevertheless retains a different part of such a conception, according to which an essence is some structural feature of a thing which causally explains other, non-essential features. I go on to develop an account of Spinoza's metaphysics of essence, according to which essences, what he sometimes calls formal essences, are produced by the divine essence prior to and independent of the creation of finite modes, and according to which essences are the formal or exemplar causes of finite modes. I then argue that finite modes, in virtue of the formal essences which they actualize, are genuine causal relata. Finally, I offer some speculations about Spinoza's answer to the question, ‘Why, in a necessitarian cosmos filled with formal essences, should there be temporal finite modes at all?’