Thursday, October 19, 2006

Spinozistic Infinity and its Relationship to Mathematical Infinity

I have decided to post some of my essays and papers that I have to write for my philosophy classes. I am not going to post the entire paper on the front page, only the first paragraph. To read the rest of the paper, click on the link called "click here to read more" immediately following the paragraph. This will be linked to a PDF of the entire paper.

The first paper is my final paper for a seminar course I took last year on Spinoza's Ethics. In it, I look at Spinoza's understanding of infinity, and compare it to the modern mathematical view of infinite sets.

Spinozistic Infinity and its Relationship to Mathematical Infinity

It might seem, at first glance that Spinoza lived in a “dark age” for the study of the infinite. A time when mathematicians doubted the actual existence of the infinite, and the only book to mention it was on the index of forbidden books. However, Spinoza seems to have risen above these difficulties, and developed a theory of the infinite, though lacking in many ways, was surprisingly close to the modern view. This paper is divided into two parts. The first part is a line-by-line analysis of the most valuable explanations of the infinite taken from the thirty-two works and letters that deal with this subject. And the second part, in which Spinoza’s theory is put in the context of the developing understanding of the infinite.

Click here to read more
Click here for the Appendix

Yours in Christ,
Thursday

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