ABSTRACT
In the preface to his Being and Idea: Developments of Some Themes in Spinoza and Hegel, Leslie Armour makes reference to two of his earlier works: Logic and Reality: An Investigation into the Idea of a Dialectical System and The Rational and the Real: An Essay in Metaphysics. This chapter reviews each of these works to better understand Armour’s interpretation of Spinoza and the ways it helps us to understand Spinoza’s rational psychology. The Rational and the Real approaches the study of being by establishing the necessary conditions for intelligible discourse about experience—one might say for intelligible experience. The aim of Logic and Reality is to establish the most general conditions for rational discourse, which is a way of dealing with the diversity of interpretations of experience sanctioned in The Rational and the Real.
