ABSTRACT
Some commentators have seen the intelligibility of nature as a fundamental principle in Spinoza’s thinking. Stuart Hampshire asked: ‘What must we suppose if Nature as a whole is to be regarded as completely intelligible?’ This, he said, ‘is the question from which Spinozism begins’. According to Martial Gueroult, ‘Absolute rationalism, imposing the total intelligibility of God, key to the total intelligibility of things’, was the ‘first article of faith for spinozism’. For Alexandre Matheron, the leitmotiv of the Ethics was that everything is intelligible.1 Strong claims: what could they have meant? How could they be defended, given the awkward fact that Spinoza said nothing at all, in explicit terms, on the intelligibility of nature, and given that the very word intelligibilis did not figure importantly in his vocabulary?
