Divine Necessity and Human Freedom in Seventeenth-Century Metaphysics

Spinoza’s causa sui and Mullā Sadrā’s wājib al-wujād

Abstract

This article compares Spinoza’s causa sui with Mullā Sadrā’s wājib al-wujād to examine how divine necessity coexists with human freedom. Through a non-genealogical analysis, it distinguishes modal necessity from graded ontological dependence. The result is two distinct compatibilist models of agency, each grounded in a different metaphysical architecture of divine causality.