ABSTRACT
This chapter was sparked by some remarks made by Lilli Alanen’s “Spinoza on the Human Mind” (Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 35) to the effect that much of what is found at what Spinoza terms the lowest level of cognition i.e., imagination is “certain” and “beyond doubt.” Some imaginative cognition would, it seems, count as knowledge in any ordinary sense of the term. How, then, do the two higher forms of cognition, reason and intuition, differ from imagination? They differ in that the two higher forms of cognition involve essence and understanding. This chapter explores Spinoza’s conception of essence and understanding and through that, his picture of scientia by reflecting on his plenum physics. Special attention is given to how the logic of what Spinoza calls “common notions,” based on invariance of structure, differs from a more traditional logic of universals, based on general kinds and particulars belonging to those kinds.
