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3. - Abstractions and Universals

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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 January 2025

By
Karolina Hübner
Edited by
Karolina Hübner  and
Justin Steinberg
Karolina Hübner
Affiliation:
Cornell University, New York
Justin Steinberg
Affiliation:
Cornell University, New York
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Summary

One of the more controversial and arguably often misunderstood topics in Spinoza’s epistemology concerns his stance on concepts of kinds or universals, expressed by terms like “white,” “horse,” or “being” – that is, by terms which, unlike proper names, are “said equally of one, a great many, or infinitely many individuals” (E2p49s; ii/134). The interpretative stakes in getting this issue right aren’t trivial, insofar as the central aim of the Ethics is to articulate the highest human good – that is, it seems, the good of a certain kind of entity, endowed with a shared nature (see, e.g., E4p18s, ii/223; E4p35d).

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The Cambridge Spinoza Lexicon , pp. 7 - 10
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Recommended Reading

Hübner, K. (2015). Spinoza on essences, universals, and beings of reason. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 96(2), 58–88.Google Scholar
Newlands, S. (2015). Spinoza’s early anti-abstractionism. In Melamed, Y. (ed.), Young Spinoza: A Metaphysician in the Making (pp. 255–71). Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Parkinson, G. H. R. (1969). Language and knowledge in Spinoza. Inquiry, 12(1), 15–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenthal, M. (2019). Spinoza on beings of reason [entia rationis] and the analogical imagination. In Ramond, C. & Stetter, J. (eds.), Spinoza in Twenty-First-Century American and French Philosophy: Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind, Moral and Political Philosophy (pp. 235–56). Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Schliesser, E. (2018). Spinoza and the philosophy of science: Mathematics, motion, and being. In Della Rocca, M. (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Spinoza (pp. 155–89). Oxford University Press.Google Scholar

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