Persistence through Time in Spinoza by Waller Jason;

Author:Waller, Jason;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2012-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

Spinoza falls short in this passage from calling a mode’s conatus a vis. He merely seems to be claiming that the essence of each mode (whatever that may turn out to be) has a certain inertial vis and that certain self-maintaining activities follow from it. The Activity and Tendency Interpretations can both accommodate this claim. Nevertheless, the passage does at least suggest that a conatus is an inertial vis.[16]

On the Tendency Interpretation it is not the vis that is the essence of the mode, but the tendency toward certain activities. Della Rocca is the most careful defender of the Tendency Interpretation of conatus. He argues in one of his more recent discussions of conatus that

for Spinoza, to strive to do x is to be in a state y such that one will do x unless prevented by external causes or by internal causes other than the state y. For Spinoza this striving or tendency is simply the striving to persist in one’s own existence and to maintain or increase what Spinoza calls one’s power of acting (Della Rocca 2003, 208).

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