AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

Spinoza emphasizes the value of intuition, the third kind of knowledge, which he associates with the greatest human joy (E5p32=Ethics, Part 5, Proposition 32). He writes little, however, about how we might come to attain intuitive knowledge. The clearest suggestion is that such knowledge somehow arises from a different, less valuable sort of knowledge, reason (E5p28), but it is difficult to see how it might do so. After all, for Spinoza, it appears that (1) reason consists in common notions (E2p40s2), which are ideas of what is common to things (E2p38C); (2) intuition is knowledge of the essence of things (E2p40s2); and (3) what is common to things does not constitute the essence of anything (E2p37). In this essay, I try to make a little headway against this problem. I argue, first, against (1), that the Ethics may suggest that there are other ideas that are also ideas of reason but that are not common notions; second, that there is good reason to think that such ideas include ideas of laws of nature; and third, mitigating the problem that (3) presents, that laws of nature do, for Spinoza, constitute the essence of things.