ABSTRACT
Baruch Spinoza's Ethica, published in 1677 as part of the Opera Posthuma, begins with an investigation of God and Nature, of ontology, and ends with a careful treatment of one active understanding of this ontology through reason. In Spinoza's Ethica, exemplary for its development of an exacting language drawn from rhetoric and dialectic, an affectus is markedly different from a passio. The lexicons and strategies developed in Spinoza's work serve as an example by which one might understand how early modern thinkers located rhetorical and dialectical determinations of affectus at the foundation of their systems as well as the basis of relations intersubjective and supernatural. Spinoza's version of affectus is, in part, a work of creative philology, dependent on rhetorical determinations of affectus, ancient and modern. The catalog of Spinoza's extant library lists a comprehensive period rhetoric, Gerardus Joannes Vossius' Aristarchus, known specifically as the commentariorum Rhetoricorum, sive Oratorium Institutionum.
