Spinoza is most often seen
as a stern advocate of mechanistic efficient causation, but examining his
philosophy in relation to the Aristotelian tradition reveals this view to be
misleading: some key passages of the Ethics resemble so much what Suárez writes
about emanation that it is most natural to situate Spinoza’s theory of
causation not in the context of the mechanical sciences but in that of a late
scholastic doctrine of the emanative causality of the formal cause; as taking a
look at the seventeenth-century philosophy of mathematics reveals, this is in
consonance also with Spinoza’s geometrical cast of mind. Against this
background, I examine Spinoza’s essentialist model of causation according to
which each thing has a formal character determined by the thing’s essence and
what follows from that essence. In the case of real things this essential
causal architecture results in efficacy, i.e. in bringing about real effects,
the key idea being that without the essential, formally structured causal
thrust there would be no efficacy in the first place. I also explain how this
model accounts for efficient causation taking place between finite things.