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