Based on Spinoza’s and Leibniz’s take on modal metaphysics, the course will explore a main theoretical issue, that is whether or not the fundamental entities of reality are particles. Is there a basic particle that cannot be further divided and gives form to reality through aggregation and disaggregation? Or is the definition of what the fundamental particles are always operative, operational – that is to say, a matter of what it is that forms the parts which in the here and the now are not further divisible? These conceptions come down to utterly incompatible conclusions. On the one end of the spectrum, concrete reality is one of the possible combinations that gets actualized while many others remain in the sphere of the possible. On the other end, there is no reality which is not actualized. All that exists is already and always actualized, to the extent that no possible exists other than what is. Based on contemporary contributions in metaphysics, ontology and philosophy of nature, the course will debate the striking differences in the ontological, ethical and political outcomes of these views. While either view makes the claim that all states of reality are always perfect, “perfection” is conceived in opposite terms: the concretion of a possible as the praise of the past conditional vs the abolition of the past conditional.

Giorgio Agamben, The Use of the Bodies, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2016, Part II, Chap. 3.
Gilles Deleuze, The Fold, London: The Athlone Press, 1993, Chaps. 1-6.
Baruch Spinoza, Ethics: Proved in Geometrical Order, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, Part I.
LLoyd Strickland, Leibniz’s Monadology : a new translation and guide, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2014.