Spinoza’s philosophical determinism: a brief comparative glimpse

I suspect that Spinoza’s choice of examples is an homage to, and disagreement with, the ancient Stoics. In a passage that Spinoza would surely have known from his early education, Cicero reports the views of the Stoics by means of an illustration involving a cylinder rolling downhill (On Fate, sections 39-43). Once it is in motion, the shape of the cylinder is what keeps it in motion. So too, the person of bad moral character may be “pushed” by — for instance — the person who cuts him off in traffic. But his subsequent road rage happens, as the Stoics say, “through him”. That is to say, his beliefs, desires and character play a causal explanatory role in what happens next. So although things could not have been otherwise given the history of the world up to that moment, still the road rager is morally responsible for what is fated to happen when it happens “through him”. It appears that Spinoza rejects this strategy for making responsibility compatible with universal causation.