CEPPA Talk (in-person & online) – Katherine Snow (Princeton)

Title: Revisiting the Spinoza Controversy in an age of Environmental Crisis

Abstract: Modern scientific naturalism arguably tries to ontologically describe or account for the entirety of the natural world using necessity. Scientific naturalism presents logical causal necessity as constituting how nature “makes” things exist, and it presents necessity in the more general or abstract sense as the only principle or idea at the core of what nature is supposed to be. Where did this practice arise in its current form, how legitimate is it, and how does this practice matter for the contemporary environmental crisis? In this talk, I will propose answers to all three of these questions which draw on my reading of the so-called “Spinoza Controversy” of 1785-1812. Among other aspects of this vital dispute, the Controversy essentially presented the West with a choice vis-à-vis the external non-human world. On the one side were those embracing a new, monist, semi-secularized “naturalism” based on neo-Spinozist ideas of nature as an intelligible and necessary whole. On the other side, skeptics like Friedrich Jacobi denied that such an idea of nature could ever be anything more than an internalist fiction. Of particular relevance to our environmental crisis today, Jacobi further quite presciently argued that the neo-Spinozist position automatically engaged in a kind of active nihilism with respect to the real external world of our direct experience.