  Spinoza’s views on necessity and possibility, which he claimed were the “principal foundation” of his Ethics (Ep75), have been less than well received by his readers, to put it mildly. From Spinoza’s contemporaries to our own, readers of the Ethics have denounced Spinoza’s views on modality as metaphysically confused at best, ethically nihilistic at  worst.[1] However, expressing matters this way implies that there is a consensus about Spinoza’s metaphysics of modality and that interpreters differ only to the extent to which they distance themselves from his outrageous position. A cursory reading of certain passages of the Ethics supports the belief that, if Spinoza is clear anywhere, it is surely in his views of necessity and contingency. After all, this is the philosopher who claims that “in nature there is nothing contingent, but all things have been determined from the necessity of the divine nature to exist and produce an effect in a certain way” (Ip29) and that “things could have been produced by God in no other way, and in no other order than they have been produced” (Ip33). Passages such as these suggest that Spinoza was a necessitarian, according to whom falsity and impossibility are co-extensive. The actual world, we might now say, is the only possible world. Events could not, in the strongest sense of that expression, have gone any differently than they in fact have gone.