ABSTRACT
The ideatum of the idea of an idea is just the idea, but it is the idea only considered in a certain respect, namely, in its formal essence and not in its objective reality. In the Ethics itself, immediately after having demonstrated in EIIp43d, that the idea and the idea of it are strictly contemporaneous, Spinoza gives us a new demonstration of the identity between the idea and certainty in EIIp43s, and in this demonstration, which is just like the one in Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (TIE), the word prius appears right after an explanation whose purpose is to justify the use of that word in its chronological sense. In TIE Spinoza stays with immediate appearances: he does not explicitly eliminate the hypothesis that knowledge of knowledge could come later than knowledge. In the Ethics, on the other hand, Spinoza uses his doctrine of parallelism to demonstrate that when one knows, one knows that one knows.
