Spinoza’s Conception of Law from a Human Perspective

Abstract In the TTP, Spinoza distinguishes between two types of law: one, which I call “type I laws”, are the laws that depend on the necessity of nature, the other, which I call “type II laws”, depend on human decision. The question of my chapter is, how Spinoza thinks these types of law relate to one another and whether one type can be reduced to the other. By taking a look at eliminative materialism (or “eliminativism” for short) I will connect the issue of whether type II laws boil down to descriptive natural laws to the issue of whether (or to what degree) Spinoza accepts teleology. Against the eliminativist challenge I am going to argue that Spinoza provides a notion of practical indispensability of teleological explanations for human beings.