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Article ID: CBB564753509

Consciousness, Ideas of Ideas and Animation in Spinoza’s Ethics (2017)

British Journal for the History of Philosophy
Volume: 25
Issue: 3
Pages: 506-525
Publication date: 2017
Language: English

URI: https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2017.1322038

DOI: 10.1080/09608788.2017.1322038

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Free will and determinism Theories of knowledge Philosophy Consciousness Ethics 17th century Spinoza, Baruch

In the following article, I aim to elucidate the meaning and scope of Spinoza’s vocabulary related to ‘consciousness’. I argue that Spinoza, at least in his Ethics, uses this notion consistently, although rarely. He introduces it to account for the knowledge we may have of the mind considered alone, as conceptually distinct from the body. This serves two purposes in Spinoza’s Ethics: to explain our illusion of a free will, on the one hand, and to refer to the knowledge we have of our mind as something eternal, on the other. I contend, therefore, that we should not confuse Spinoza’s technical use of the notion of ‘consciousness’ with the ‘degrees of animation’ that he also evokes in the Ethics. Consciousness, for Spinoza, is neither a faculty, nor a property specific to certain minds or ideas. Furthermore, consciousness does not come in degrees. Indeed, Spinoza’s account of consciousness is not intended to differentiate kinds of minds in terms of awareness of their respective ideas.

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Article Federico Boccaccini; Anna Marmodoro (2017) Powers, Abilities and Skills in Early Modern Philosophy. British Journal for the History of Philosophy (pp. 435-442). unapi

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