Laws and Nature in Spinoza’s Ethics

abstract:A tradition associated with Aristotle, essentialism, emphasizes the effort to show how effects follow from laws distinctive of the thing in which they occur. A different tradition, associated with the scientific revolution, unificationism, emphasizes the effort to show that nature conforms to laws because it is in some ways uniform. In his accounts of laws and nature in the Ethics, Spinoza defends exceptionless, detailed versions of essentialism and unificationism.