Stanford Humanities Center
Josefine Klingspor received her PhD in Philosophy from Yale University in 2024. She works in early modern philosophy, with a special emphasis on Spinoza’s metaphysics. Klingspor also has a strong interest in medieval philosophy and the philosophy of disability.
SHC Project
Conatus and Preservation
Spinoza is a monist, someone according to whom, in some strong sense, all is one. A perennial issue for the monist is how to understand the relationship between the one thing of which the world fundamentally consists and the many things existing in the world, or as Spinoza puts it, between substance and modes. Klingspor’s current project aims to deepen our understanding of the substance-mode relation in Spinoza’s philosophy by exploring the interplay of two fundamental commitments of his, namely that modes continually depend for their existence on substance and that each individual mode strives to persevere in existing (the so-called conatus doctrine).
