This is a formal ontology of Spinoza's Ethica, extracted from the Elwes translation by a documented methodology, grounded in the Basic Formal Ontology, and validated for consistency by the HermiT description-logic reasoner. The artifact is offered as a citable scholarly contribution and as an instrument for reading the Ethics with formal precision.
What this is
Spinoza wrote the Ethics in the manner of Euclid: definitions, axioms, propositions, demonstrations. Each proposition is supposed to follow rigorously from what precedes it. The work is one of the most systematic philosophical texts in the Western canon, and is also, partly for that reason, one of the most difficult to read.
This ontology renders that systematicity in formal terms. Each Spinozan concept (substance, attribute, mode, conatus, idea, body, affect) appears as a class typed under the Basic Formal Ontology. Each proposition's commitments appear as axioms over those classes. Every commitment is traceable to the passage that produced it; every commitment was checked, when entered, against the existing graph by an automated reasoner.
The ontology is offered for three uses:
- As a reference structure for scholars who need to characterize Spinoza's commitments precisely.
- As a teaching aid for students learning to read the Ethics systematically.
- As a comparative object for philosophers building parallel ontologies of other thinkers, where shared BFO grounding makes formal comparison possible.
It does not replace prose engagement with the text. It is a complement, an instrument, an artifact.
No login required. No queries logged. Pure public artifact.
Contents
Browser
Interactive viewer with BFO tree, source-text view, concept browser, and full-text search.
iiMethodology
How the ontology was extracted, validated, and finalized. Tools, decisions, limitations.
iiiCitation
How to cite this artifact. BibTeX, Chicago, MLA. The persistent DOI.
ivDownload
The OWL artifact itself. Inspect with Protégé, query with rdflib, reason with HermiT.
What this is not
This is not Spinoza's Ethics. It is one rendering of one translation of the Ethics into a formal vocabulary. Many decisions were made in extraction that another scholar might make differently. The methodology page describes those decisions. The ontology is a scholarly artifact open to disagreement, criticism, and replacement by better artifacts.
The reasoner that validated the ontology checked for formal consistency. It did not check for fidelity to Spinoza's text or for philosophical defensibility. Those judgments belong to the reader.
Acknowledgements
The Basic Formal Ontology, on which this work depends, was developed by Barry Smith and colleagues over the past two decades and is documented in Building Ontologies with Basic Formal Ontology (Arp, Smith, and Spear, MIT Press, 2015). The HermiT reasoner is the work of Birte Glimm, Ian Horrocks, Boris Motik, Giorgos Stoilos, and Zhe Wang. The R.H.M. Elwes translation of Spinoza's Ethics is in the public domain and was sourced from Project Gutenberg.
The extraction pipeline is BFO-Agent, an architecture by the same author. Source available at github.com/dkoepsell/bfo-agent.