In 'Cartographing Gravity' (2026) the organizing terms 'conatus' and 'potentia' are imported from Spinoza's Ethics to name inertia and gravitation, with conatus also traced to a rival non-Spinozist sense in Hobbes

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The two terms that organize de Haro and Elizalde's operational reconstruction of gravity (claim-de-haro-elizalde-2026-reconstruct-linearized-gr-from-conatus-and-potentia) are taken explicitly from Baruch Spinoza. The paper calls the proper-time extremization governing free fall "the physical manifestation of the Spinozian classical conatus—the innate endeavor of matter to persevere in its own state—translated here into the relativistic domain," and names gravitation "a physical manifestation of Spinoza's potentia—the capacity of matter to modulate the local rate of proper time," while "the motion of freely falling particles is governed by their conatus—the intrinsic endeavor to optimize experienced proper time along a worldline." The paper's reference list cites The Collected Works of Spinoza, Vol. I (Princeton, 1985), including the Ethics (orig. 1677), for both terms, with H.A. Wolfson's The Philosophy of Spinoza (Harvard, 1934) as secondary gloss.

The authors also mark a rival lineage for conatus: Thomas Hobbes (De Corpore, 1655) uses the word physically for "infinitesimal motion" — a distinct, non-Spinozist sense — and the term also appears in Descartes' Principia Philosophiae (1644). So the paper's choice is not merely to borrow a word but to pick the Spinozist (striving-to-persist) sense over the Hobbesian (infinitesimal-motion) one.

This is where the paper's actual novelty lives: as the derivation notes record, the physics (linearized GR in harmonic gauge, closed by Lovelock's theorem) is standard; the contribution is conceptual and terminological. Spinoza is otherwise known to the vault only in an unrelated craft-history context — his hand-ground lens-grinding dish — making this a second, independent appearance of the same figure across unrelated clusters.