Prejudices, Common Notions, Intuitions

Abstract

Abstract In E2p47s, Spinoza claims that “God’s infinite essence and his eternity are known to all.” Moreover, immediately after, he goes on to proclaim “that men do not have so clear a knowledge of God as they do of the common notions.” This chapter is an attempt to unpack and reconcile these seemingly counter-intuitive and contradictory assertions about knowledge of God in the Ethics by correlating them with Spinoza’s parallel discussion of the same topic in the Tractatus theologico-politicus, chapter 6, including an associated annotation, the Annotation VI. This allows showing that the key to understanding E2p47s lies in understanding the nature and role of those “common notions” that Spinoza declares to be “clearer” than our knowledge of God in E2p47s, and in understanding how our common notions of things, our “reasoning” about things, relates to our knowledge of God.