ABSTRACT
In her article “The Contextualist Revolution in Early Modern Philosophy,” Christia Mercer introduces what she calls the “getting things right constraint” or the GTRC for historians of philosophy. Mercer describes this constraint in the following way: “historians of philosophy should not attribute claims or ideas to historical figures without concern for whether or not they are ones the figures would recognize as their own.” Abiding by the GTRC is, of course, not sufficient for producing decent work in early modern philosophy, but the author's hope is that by abiding by the GTRC constraint, his account of how Spinoza would (or should) answer Molyneux’s question will not be dismissed on the grounds that it is ahistorical. Like Molyneux and Locke, Spinoza denies that we directly perceive the nature of external objects in sensory perception. According to Spinoza, in sensory perception what we directly perceive are the ideas of the affections of our body.
