Self Preservation Is Not The Bee s Knees Essay - 2100 Words

Self-Preservation is Not the Bee’s Knees: A Refutation to Part III of Spinoza’s Ethics Benedict de Spinoza takes an unique stance in his Ethics, claiming all things exist only to prolong their own existence and preserve their essence. Yet there are plenty of examples in nature alone that seem to counter his claims where creatures strive for an action that will lead to their deaths, as seen in the case of various species of spiders and bees. However, Spinoza’s claim that things strive to preserve their essence fails to fulfill his goal in explaining how and why nature works the way it does, as seen in the case with self-sacrificial spiders as well as the behavioral and biological aspects of male bees (drones). Thus, I argue that although Spinoza tries to move away from a teleological account of the world to a more mechanistic one by introducing his idea of self-preservation, his idea is lacking and is unable to actually explain anything in depth, and we therefore must look to Aristotle’s account of final causes to actually understand the behavior of aforem entioned creatures. In order to develop my argument I will begin by discussing Spinoza’s stance on the self-preservation of essence and why his account fails to actually provide an in-depth explanation about how nature works, and then I will look at the behavior of male redback spiders as well as the self-destructive biology of male bees which will help demonstrate why Aristotle’s teleological account of nature is stillShow MoreRelatedIgbo Dictionary129408 Words   |  518 Pagesspeech (occasionally this is carried over into English so that quarter /’kwÉ”:tÉ™/ is pronounced [’xwÉ”ta])9. 4. Alphabetization and arrangement The alphabetical order is as follows: a b ch d e f g gb gh gw h i á »â€¹ j k kp kw l m n nw ny Å‹ o á »  p r s sh t u á » ¥ w y z high tone (unmarked), step tone ( ¯), low tone (`). It will be observed that the order here is strictly alphabetical, in that dotted letters follow their undotted counterparts (e.g. á »â€¹ follows i) and double letters (digraphs) follow single