Room 243, Mandel Building, Mt. Scopus Campus | shein.noa@gmail.com
Dr. Noa Shein is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy as well as the director of the Edelstein Center for the History and Philosophy of Science, Technology and Medicine, at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Her research focuses on the intricate inter-relations between metaphysics and physics in the early modern period. Within this context, most of her research is devoted to investigating Spinoza’s thought while simultaneously situating his views within major philosophical debates across early modern Europe (17th-18th centuries). One question that especially interests her is how to understand finite bodies (such as a table, or my own human body) within Spinoza’s metaphysics given his famous proclamation: “Except God, no substance can be or be conceived" (Ethics, Part One, Proposition 15). More recently, Noa has been tracing how the metaphysical foundations for physics that Spinoza establishes were perceived by Newton and his contemporaries such as Henry More, and Anne Conway. Spinoza’s views were perceived as menacing since they allow for a dynamic physics (unlike Descartes’s mechanical physics) one the one hand, yet deny God the role of a creator which was central to views of Newton and his milieu.
Her publications include:
“The False Dichotomy between Objective and Subjective Interpretations of Spinoza’s Theory of Attributes,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy (2009); “Spinning Strands into Aspects: Realism, Idealism, and Finite Modes in Spinoza,” European Journal of Philosophy (2020); and “Anti-Cartesianism in Newton’s General Scholium to the Principia” in Newton’s General Scholium, Stephen Snobelen, Steffen Ducheyne, and Scott Mandelborte, eds., Brill (forthcoming).