Article ID: CBB699522436

The Greatest Deception: Fiction, Falsity and Manifestation in Spinoza’s Metaphysical Thoughts (2020)

unapi

“The first meaning of true and false”, writes Spinoza in a neglected passage of the Metaphysical Thoughts, “seems to have had its origin in stories”. Ideas are true when they “show” us things as they are; they are false when they do not, when they are fictional. In this essay, I argue that what appears at first sight to be a simple assertion of a correspondence theory of truth in fact opens onto broad historical transformations in the nature of meaning that reshaped the very atmosphere of truth: the emergence of a new kind of fictionality, transformations in the sense of logical interpretation, and ultimately transformations in the structures and sources of the natural light, that “clarity” which constitutes for Spinoza, as for Descartes, an indispensable criterion for certainty.

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Authors & Contributors
Melamed, Yitzhak Y.
Hellberg, Dustin
Peter B. Thompson
Goldman, Loren
John D. Schwetman
Lord, Beth
Concepts
Metaphysics
Philosophy
Fiction
Philosophy of science
Correspondence theory of truth
Truth
Time Periods
17th century
19th century
20th century
Early modern
Modern
21st century
Places
Netherlands
Great Britain
Institutions
Large Hadron Collider (LHC)
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